Understanding Your Audience: How Psychologists Can Help Emergency Managers Improve Disaster Warning Compliance
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Karla Vermeulen
Abstract
As the field of disaster mental health has grown dramatically over recent decades, there have been many advances in universal interventions for disaster survivors and responders, but psychologists have had little involvement in helping to prevent harm by working with emergency managers to improve warning compliance. This opinion article summarizes insights about human behavior and decision-making processes that may help managers prevent common reactions to warnings, including denial of the threat that causes people to make unproductive preliminary judgments that are then reinforced through psychological mechanisms including confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. Ways to understand this process from the citizen’s perspective are described, as are results of a survey of emergency and mental health professionals leading to four goals for warning construction: generating appropriate fear, rarity, clarity, and credibility.
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©2014 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Opinion Articles
- Understanding Your Audience: How Psychologists Can Help Emergency Managers Improve Disaster Warning Compliance
- Reframing the Climate Change Debate to Better Leverage Policy Change: An Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Psychology
- Research and Policy in Homeland Security and Climate Change: Results from a Roundtable and Thoughts on Developing a National Research Agenda for Climate Change and Security
- Research Articles
- Evaluating Children’s Learning of Adaptive Response Capacities from ShakeOut, an Earthquake and Tsunami Drill in Two Washington State School Districts
- Influence of Mental Health on Disaster Preparedness: Findings from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2007–2009
- Volunteer Fire Chiefs’ Perceptions of Retention and Recruitment Challenges in Rural Fire Departments: The Case of North Dakota, USA
- Flu at the Zoo: Emergency Management Training for the Nation’s Zoos and Aquariums
- Eyes to the Sky: Situating the Role of Storm Spotters in the Warning and Response Network
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Opinion Articles
- Understanding Your Audience: How Psychologists Can Help Emergency Managers Improve Disaster Warning Compliance
- Reframing the Climate Change Debate to Better Leverage Policy Change: An Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Psychology
- Research and Policy in Homeland Security and Climate Change: Results from a Roundtable and Thoughts on Developing a National Research Agenda for Climate Change and Security
- Research Articles
- Evaluating Children’s Learning of Adaptive Response Capacities from ShakeOut, an Earthquake and Tsunami Drill in Two Washington State School Districts
- Influence of Mental Health on Disaster Preparedness: Findings from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2007–2009
- Volunteer Fire Chiefs’ Perceptions of Retention and Recruitment Challenges in Rural Fire Departments: The Case of North Dakota, USA
- Flu at the Zoo: Emergency Management Training for the Nation’s Zoos and Aquariums
- Eyes to the Sky: Situating the Role of Storm Spotters in the Warning and Response Network
