Tohoku University Motoaki Sugiura Lab.

In coastal areas, when an earthquake occurs, people need to take evacuation actions from the tsunami that may be generated. In doing so, humans are thought to evaluate and react to disaster risks and take evacuation actions based on various types of information. Until now, it has not been clarified how attitudes toward assessing disaster risk, reacting to disaster risk, and the type of information influence these decisions. Nor has it been elucidated how these factors relate to each individual's personality traits (Big 5, Power to Live).
In this study, we developed a tsunami evacuation simulation task consisting of two types of information and conducted an online experiment. The experiment revealed that risk-sensitive atittude, risk-scrutinity attitude, and tendency to perceive sensory information as more risky than numerical information independently contribute to evacuation decision making. We also found that the former two were associated with tsunami evacuation-promoting personality traits (Emotion regulation, Leadership) in actual disasters.
These results were published in the Journal of Disaster Research Special Issue on Literacy for Disaster Resilience: Building a Societal Capacity for Reducing Disasters Due to Earthquake and Volcanic Eruption. Earthquake and Volcanic Eruption. (Takubo)
https://doi.org/10.20965/jdr.2024.p0081