A potentially effective way to influence people's fire prevention behavior is letting them experience a fire in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). We analyze the effects of experiencing a fire in an IVE (versus an information sheet) on psychological determinants of behavior-knowledge, vulnerability, severity, self-efficacy, and locus of control-based mainly on arguments from Protection Motivation Theory and the Health Belief Model. Crucial in our setup is that we also relate these determinants to actual prevention behavior. Results show that IVE has the hypothesized effects on vulnerability, severity, and self-efficacy, and an unexpected negative effect on knowledge. Only knowledge and vulnerability showed subsequent indirect effects on actual prevention behavior. There remains a direct positive effect of IVE on prevention behavior that cannot be explained by any of the determinants. Our results contradict the implicit assumption that an induced change in these psychological determinants by IVE, necessarily implies a change in behavior. A recommendation for research on the effects of IVE's is, whenever possible, to study the actual target behavior as well.
The effects of vulnerability, severity, costs, effort, and effectiveness on prevention behavior, derived from protection motivation theory and the health belief model, have been extensively tested in the literature and have all been shown to predict rather well. In this study we test the effects of these determinants in a new context: the domestic risk prevention domain. The specific behaviors under study are related to the risks of burglary, fire, and water damage. In addition to previous studies, our multilevel research design allows us to evaluate which differences in the performance of domestic prevention behavior can be attributed to differences between persons and which to differences between behaviors within persons. Our results show that all determinants are relevant predictors for domestic risk prevention behavior. Disentangling the within‐person and between‐person effects shows that prevention behavior depends more on the relative evaluation of the prevention behavior determinants for a given person (e.g., a person perceives a smoke alarm to be more effective than antiburglar strips), than on the differences between persons regarding the general perception of these determinants (e.g., some persons find prevention behaviors in general more effective than other persons). To increase the performance of domestic risk prevention behaviors, we advise that interventions should focus on increasing a person's perception of risks and prevention behaviors relative to other risks and prevention behaviors rather than focusing on changing people's general perceptions of all risks and behaviors or focusing on specific target groups.
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