Why Do People Take Fewer Damage Mitigation Actions Than Survival Actions? Other Factors Outweigh Cost

Do Social Norms Affect Support for Earthquake-Strengthening Legislation? Comparing the Effects of Descriptive and Injunctive Norms

“…Information about a risk alone is therefore not necessarily enough to motivate disaster preparation; this behavior can be affected by a range of factors, such as beliefs about preparation. Risk perception is a less significant factor in preparation than beliefs such as self-efficacy (whether people think they are able to take the action; McClure, Spittal, Fischer, & Charleson, 2015) and response efficacy (whether they think the action will help to address the risk; Terpstra & Lindell, 2013). Although many people see earthquake preparation as their personal responsibility (Arlikatti, Lindell, & Prater, 2007), people also believe that their city should prepare in ways such as strengthening vulnerable buildings (Flynn, Slovic, Mertz, & Carlisle, 1999).…”

Behavioral Response in the Immediate Aftermath of Shaking: Earthquakes in Christchurch and Wellington, New Zealand, and Hitachi, Japan

“…There has been a significant amount of research on household preparedness for earthquakes [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] but there has been substantially less research on people’s responses during earthquakes. Recent studies by Prati et al [12] and Lindell et al [13] have built on previous work [14,15,16,17,18,19,20].…”

Developing a comprehensive model of hazard preparedness: Lessons from the Christchurch earthquake

“…The risk from not doing so arises from the possibility that easier to adopt "survival" items may be seen as substitutable (i.e., people may see storing water as equally as effective as securing furniture and fittings) with their structural counterparts, with people's perceived level of preparedness thus being overestimated as a result of being based on a subset (survival) of items. That is, people may believe that adopting low-cost items means they are well prepared [10,37]. However, lower levels of structural preparedness increases the risk of property loss, damage and injury from building collapse and greater levels of disruption and costs from, for example, having to relocate [13].…”

“…If confirmation of preparedness as a multi-faceted phenomenon is forthcoming, a more searching analysis of predictors will be required [5,8,10,36,37]. The rational for the latter is introduced later.…”