title: Are People Interested in Probabilities of Natural Disasters?
abstract: Previous research has demonstrated that in naturalistic risky decisions people tend to have little interest in receiving information about probabilities. The present research asked whether subjects search for and employ probabilistic information in situations that are representative of natural disasters: namely, situations where (1) they have no control over the occurrence of a negative event and (2) there might be huge losses of physical and human capital. Pseudo-realistic scenarios involving risky situations were presented to 116 experimental participants. Based on the active information search paradigm, subjects were given only a basic description of the situation and had to acquire additional information from the experimenter. In addition to the main task, the individual risk aversion of participants was measured. We demonstrate that in pseudo-naturalistic scenarios involving natural disasters people tend to show more interest in probabilities compared to scenarios with generally more controllable risks. Moreover, this interest increases with an increase in the importance of the situation to the decisionmaker. The importance of the situation also has a positive influence on the thoroughness of information search. The experiment detected no connection between individual risk aversion and information search.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Economic Psychology and Decision Sciences, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Julija
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Michailova
authors.affiliation: Centre for Economic Psychology and Decision Sciences, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Tadeusz
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tyszka
authors.affiliation: Centre for Economic Psychology and Decision Sciences, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Katarzyna
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Pfeifer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003657:Decision Making; D004190:Disasters; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011336:Probability; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Active information search; decision making under risk; natural disaster; probability