Risk Analysis, Vol. 32, No.

4, 2012

DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.2012.01791.x

Introduction

Risk Perception and Behaviors: Anticipating

and Responding to Crises
William J. Burns1, and Paul Slovic2

The past decade has witnessed disasters on a

scale of human suffering and economic costs that
have served to alert scientists and public officials
alike of the challenges that lay ahead in the management of risk. Natural disasters such as Katrina (2005),
the earthquake in Haiti (2010), and the tsunami in
Southeast Asia (2004) have put cities, nations, and
even entire regions of the world in harms way, producing a toll of $380 billion in losses in 2011.(1) On
September 11, 2001, a small band of highly determined extremists were able, through their terrorist attacks, to shape U.S. policy in unprecedented
ways, leading America to war and to dramatic security measures at home. The world economy has
also not been spared from crisis, as in September
2008 it teetered on the verge of economic collapse
following the cascading failures of mortgage and financial markets in the United States and elsewhere.
More recently, in March 2011 the world witnessed
in horror as Japan struggled to deal with the triple
calamity of a massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. These events remind us that as individuals, organizations, communities, and nations we
are highly vulnerable to catastrophic events. This vulnerability arises not just because of the scale or unpredictability of these disasters, but because of the
complex manner in which people and institutions respond to risk. For example, perceptions of risk and
risk-related behaviors may amplify the social, political, and economic impact of disasters well beyond
their direct consequences as they did following the

attacks on September 11. There is a clear need to

provide researchers and practitioners with a better
understanding of how individuals, communities, and
even nations should prepare for and respond to such
calamities.
Responding to this need, in August 2009
Decision Research, the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE
University of Southern California), and Pacific
Northwest National Labs (PNNL) jointly organized
a workshop at the University of Oregon to explore
possible avenues of research leading to insights in
risk perception, risk and crisis communication, and
risk management. We purposely invited an eclectic
group of risk researchers whose disciplines included
psychology, sociology, communications, system dynamics, statistical modeling, policy analysis, and the
law. This collaborative effort led to a conference on
risk perception and risk communication hosted at the
University of Southern California in March 2010. To
this core group, we now included researchers from
economics, network analysis, engineering, decision
analysis, and the Los Angeles emergency management community. This gathering had, as one of its
goals, producing a collection of papers devoted to
risk and crisis communication, risk management, and
public response to a wide assortment of crises. The
guiding theme was to explore crises in a dynamic context to better estimate long-term impacts and suggest
mitigation strategies.
Diverse hazards and methodological approaches
are addressed in this collection of articles. For example, Michele Wood and her co-authors collected
data from a large nationwide sample to examine
how best to communicate about disaster preparedness. Their findings suggest that the strongest motivator of taking preparedness actions is when average

1 Decision

Research, Eugene, OR, USA.

Systems and Operation Management, Cal state University, San Marcos, CA, USA.
Address correspondence to William J. Burns, Decision Research,
1201 Oak St., Eugene, OR 97401, USA; tel: 541-485-2400; fax:
541-485-2403; bburns@csusm.edu.
2 Information

579

C 2012 Society for Risk Analysis

0272-4332/12/0100-0579$22.00/1 

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people share what they have done to prepare with
others. Programs to increase public preparedness
should emphasize the actions people should take to
become better prepared rather than the physical impacts of disasters. Wood and colleagues also stress
the importance of distributing information that is
dense. Risk communication is dense when it conveys
a consistent message, articulated by different information providing partners (e.g., public officials, medical experts), through multiple public communication
channels (e.g., traditional and social media) over a
sufficient period of time. The authors contend that
dense communication reaches people through the
background noise of every day life.
Tim Sellnow and his co-authors examined the
value of instructional communication in crisis situations. Using video presentations, they simulated
a TV news broadcast (a news anchor and an expert from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention) of a food contamination outbreak. The
messages in the broadcast were experimentally manipulated to reflect different learning style preferences (doing, watching, thinking, and feeling). They
found that the learning style and characteristics of
the receiver mattered to the perceived importance
of the message and the likelihood of taking action.
The authors recommend tailoring messages based
on learning style preference and select demographic
characteristics.
Deepa Anagondahalli and Monique Michell
Turner also investigated the interaction of message
content and characteristics of the receiver in the context of food contamination. The difference in this
case was that the contamination was intentional.
The authors experimentally manipulated the cultural
identity of the perpetrator and reasons for the action. They found that attribution of blame was related to reported purchase intent and trust toward
the affected organization. They also found Asians
reacted to attribution of blame differently than
non-Asians. Given increasingly diverse audiences,
the article highlights the need for crisis and risk communicators to understand differences in cultural perspectives and response to crises and risk in order to
design more effective messages.
Erwann Michel-Kerjan and his co-authors used
archival data from the National Flood Insurance
Program from 2001 to 2009 to examine, for the first
time, the average tenure for flood insurance policies.
The authors observed that homeowners typically let
their policies lapse after between two and four years.
They propose several policy measures to address

Burns and Slovic

the challenges posed by homeowners inadequate
insurance coverage, including, for banks and
government-sponsored enterprises, strengthening
their requirements and the introduction of multiyear
flood insurance contracts attached to the property.
The authors state that both of these measures would
likely provide more coverage stability and encourage
investments in risk-reduction measures.
Michael Lindell and Ronald Perry describe a
protective action decision model (PADM). This
multistage model integrates the processing of information from social and environmental cues with
messages that social sources transmit through communication channels to those at risk. It identifies
three critical predecision processes (reception, attention, and comprehension of warnings or exposure,
attention, and interpretation of environmental/social
cues) and three core perceptionsthreat perceptions, protective action perceptions, and stakeholder
perceptionsthat form the basis for decisions about
how to respond to an imminent or long-term threat.
The authors point out that because major disasters
are so costly even small changes in protective behavior can be valuable.
Consistent with Lindell and Perrys call to mitigate the cost of a disaster by engaging the public,
James Giesecke and his co-authors investigated the
economic consequences of a radiological attack on
Los Angeles. The attacks direct economic effects
were divided into two categories: resource losses,
describing the events capacity for physical destruction and business disruption; and behavioral effects,
describing the events impact on risk perceptions.
A nationwide online panel responded to the simulated attack in terms of their willingness to visit Los
Angeles or purchase products from the area. Using
computable general equilibrium modeling (CGE),
the authors estimated the economic consequences
arising from public response to be 16 times that of
the events physical destruction and business disruption. These effects are largely attributed to the stigma
of such an attack.
Bill Schulze and Brian Wansink examined stigma
carefully in a study that looked at the contrasting
view of behavioral response to risk from the perspective of economists and psychologists. They review four studies (e.g., contaminated water, mad cow
disease) that provide evidence for a dual-process
model of risk that incorporates both reason and fear.
They show that consumers responses are a mix of
proportional (deliberative, taking into consideration probabilities and consequence magnitudes) and

Risk Perception and Behaviors

dichotomous responses (e.g., safe or not safe) that
are relatively more continuous in situations where
deliberation is possible and more dichotomous in
emotional and stressful situations. This model allows
a clear definition of stigma and suggests new ways to
mitigate stigma.
Heather Rosoff and her co-authors examined
how public response changed over the course
of an escalating biological disaster. Respondents
in Washington and Los Angeles were presented with
a scenario consisting of local news reports depicting
a biological disaster unfolding over a 15-day period.
The viruss origin (terrorist attack, medical lab incident, unknown) and respondents proximity to the
virus (local vs. opposite coast) were experimentally
manipulated. The scenario was presented in discrete
episodes allowing responses to be tracked over time.
Respondents negative affect, perceived risk, and intended avoidance behaviors (e.g., changing daily routines, avoiding public places) increased as the flu epidemic escalated. The reactions of respondents who
were closer to the origin increased more rapidly and
with greater intensity. As the epidemic increased,
both the terrorist and the accidental flu releases were
perceived as being less risky and were less likely
to lead to avoidance behavior than the unknown
release.
Shelly McArdle and her co-authors used ABC
and CBS news polls to study change in public response over time to the attacks on September 11,
2001. Concern about another attack in the near future decreased measurably within six months and
then leveled off. Respondents 3045 years, females,
or living in the northeast were the most concerned.
Worry about flying was similar to concern about another attack. Confidence in the government to protect citizens against future attacks steadily decreased
over time. Allowing the FBI to investigate threats
was more important than protecting personal privacy
for the first two years, after that protection of privacy
became more important. Respondents 3045 years,
females, or living in the south showed the greatest
preference for FBI investigations of threat. After six
months, there was a decline in peoples willingness to
change their daily routines as a result of the attacks.
Respondents 3045 years or females reported having
made the largest changes to their daily lives.
William Burns and his co-authors were also interested in how public reaction to a crisis changes
over time. From September 2008 to October 2009,
they tracked a nationwide panels response to the
financial crisis. Using latent growth curve model-

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ing they observed that negative emotions and perceived risk declined quickly despite the persistence
of poor economic news, suggesting the presence of
mechanisms nudging people back to a precrisis baseline. Negative emotions were related positively and
optimism about achieving future personal objectives
was related negatively to perceived risk. The authors
recommend that risk management and communication should work in sync with the emotional and social mechanisms that encourage peoples tendency to
adapt and return to normal.
A number of policy recommendations have been
presented so far and with these come implicit tradeoffs. Robin Dillon and her co-authors discuss an approach to systematically assessing policy tradeoffs.
The authors used value-focused thinking, which hierarchically organizes ones values, to develop a model
of how people evaluate domestic intelligence policy
alternatives. These policy alternatives touch directly
upon conflicting tradeoffs of privacy, civil liberty, and
security, which together help shape the general public acceptability of each alternative. They found a
clear pattern that individuals who viewed an alternative as acceptable also perceived it to be higher on
most if not all objectives, consistent with other halo
effects found in the literature. Insights about why
people have different feelings about the acceptability
of policy alternatives can potentially inform decisionmakers and aid in the construction of a risk communication strategy.
In summary, the articles in this collection have
addressed how the public might or did respond to a
wide range of crises. These include floods, food contamination (both accidental and intentional), mad
cow disease, a radiological attack on a major U.S.
city, a flu outbreak (accidental, intentional, unknown
cause), and a financial crisis in the United States.
The focus has been on understanding public response
in order to better prescribe risk management and
communication strategies, and thereby lessen the societal costs of major disasters. The methodological
approaches have included archival data, national surveys (both cross-sectional and longitudinal), experiments involving simulated newscasts (both one-time
exposures and news reports that evolve over time),
experiments adhering to the strict standards of realism (no deception) in behavioral economics, and policy analysis using a value-focused approach.
A consistent theme throughout has been that
disasters are costly, public response to a crisis contributes in large measure to this cost, and that carefully crafted and tested risk communication can help.

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Public response appears sensitive to disaster type,
with terrorism producing the greatest concern. Negative emotions are positively related to perceived risk,
and both increase with the escalation of a crisis and
may decline quickly as people adapt to news of the
disaster. People nearer to the disaster have heightened emotion and perceived risk and exhibit more
avoidance behavior.
Risk communication should consider the multistage process people use in deciding how to prepare
for and respond to a crisis. Tailoring messages that
reflect peoples learning style, cultural identity, and
certain demographic characteristics will improve receptivity. Content should focus as much on what people have done to prepare for a crisis as on the risk
itself. Government and business should engage and
participate with the public in risk-reducing strategies
(e.g., multiyear flood insurance contracts) to offset
peoples tendency to procrastinate or to forget the
hardships of past disasters. Risk management policy
will involve tradeoffs, and value focused thinking can
help stakeholders select among alternatives.
We need a better understanding of how emotion,
perceived risk, and risk-related behavior emerge
amidst a crisis and then decay. This trajectory will
depend on the nature of the disaster. Hence, more
longitudinal research is needed on public response
to a wide assortment of hazards. It is especially important to understand the relative contribution and
interaction of emotion (system 1) and deliberation
(system 2) in responding to threat. Similarly, it would
be important to know how people and communities
become resilient. These objectives will require more
sophisticated data collection (e.g., compelling experimental simulations, longitudinal field experiments

Burns and Slovic

tracking actual events, clever use of archival data)
and more ambitious modeling platforms (e.g., dynamic CGE modeling, agent-based modeling). The
complexity of modern disasters definitely requires
multidisciplinary approaches to address the most interesting research challenges ahead.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers SES-0728934,
SES-0820197, and SES-0901036. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in this
document are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect views of the National Science
Foundation. Additionally, this research was also
supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security through the National Center for Risk and
Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE)
under award numbers 2007-ST-061-000001 and 2010ST-061-RE0001. However, any opinions, findings,
and conclusions or recommendations in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect views of the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security, or the University of Southern
California, or CREATE. We would like to thank
Toni Deniels from Decision Research and Isaac
Maya from CREATE for their help facilitating workshops and conferences that led to this collection of
articles.
REFERENCE
1. Schiermeierm Q. Disaster toll tallied. Nature, 2012; 481:124
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