Decision-making during a crisis is affected by several sources of information and prior knowledge, such as factual (statistical) information, narratives of others, and real-time governmental messages. The present study investigated how two types of information (statistics and narratives) influence helping behavior after the occurrence of a traffic accident. We used a scripted crisis scenario in a virtual environment, where several types of behavior could be measured. The main dependent variable was whether participants would move the victim or not. By moving the victim, he would be rescued from a potentially unsafe position (the tilted truck could contain poisonous substances), but moving also entailed a risk of increased injury (according to the statistical information the most likely consequence). Our results indicate that more victims were moved in the narrative condition before an official message was received. Participants who had received statistical information or both types of information performed similar to the control condition. After the official message, informing participants to keep distance, more victims were moved in the narrative condition and in the combined narrative and statistical condition. A narrative therefore has stronger effects when (information about) the actual situation matches the narrative's content. In contrast with our expectations, affective response did not mediate the relationship between narrative information and moving victims. An alternative explanation would be that narratives trigger a more heuristic way of information processing.Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on 29 August 2005. It was by far the most expensive natural disaster with damages of over $100 billion, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history with over 1200 deaths (Galea et al. 2008). Two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, local governments spread information about the actual situation and evacuation orders via news broadcasts. As evaluation studies of the incident showed, however, people's decision to evacuate was not only affected by information provided by the government, but also by narratives of relatives and other members of people's social networks (Messias, Barrington, and Lacy 2012).The information that individuals use to make their decision during a crisis is not only from different sources (e.g. government and family), but also of different types. On the one hand, official information ARTICLE HISTORY
This study aimed to gain insight into the interplay between citizens’ reactions on Twitter and governmental communications as well as their effects on self‐reliant behaviour and trust. Two experimental studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants first received other citizens’ reactions followed by the government's communications about how to act. Participants received supporting, opposing, mixed, or no reactions from other citizens. In Study 2, participants first received the government's communications with either certain or uncertain crisis information, followed by the different citizens’ reactions. The results showed that citizens’ reactions via Twitter are not necessarily detrimental to the effectiveness of governmental communications regarding self‐reliant behaviour. In addition, our findings suggest being careful with providing uncertain governmental communications during a crisis.
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