RAPID: Hurricane Harvey, natural disasters, and willingness to help over time

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

Greater willingness to help is an important source of assistance to victims of natural disasters such as hurricanes. Such willingness may translate into immediate desire to help (e.g., donate money) as well as the long-term propensity to support policies contributing to disaster mitigation and adaptation (at a possible cost to tax-payers). Willingness to help, however, may be a product of complex interaction between individual socioeconomic status, demographic characteristics, psychological attributes, political ideology, and beliefs about the issue of climate change. Moreover, the rally effect may be short-term for some but long-term for others. Understanding the complexity of this relationship may increase efficiency of social mobilization to help victims of natural disasters and contribute to greater environmental awareness and support for natural disaster preparedness in general. The investigator proposes to conduct a two-wave survey of public opinion on a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States. The goal of the survey is to examine respondents' reactions to hurricanes (specifically, Hurricane Harvey) and analyze how individual attitudes and willingness to help change over time. Previously, scholars suggested investigating the time course of reactions to natural disasters but the temporal dimension of public opinion in the context of hurricanes and other such disasters remains largely unexplored. The proposed survey design examines possible deterioration of empathetic concern for victims of the disaster in the context of individual ideological preferences (e.g., liberal or conservative), partisan/political identification, psychological traits (e.g., perspective taking, social desirability bias), behavioral propensities (e.g., risk preferences, future discounting), and social environment (e.g., existence of tangible social support). An important goal of the project is to establish under which conditions helping behavior is most stable and under which it is most fragile and short-lived. Previous research has shown that willingness to help increases if responsibility for disasters could be attributed to human actions (e.g., government), not natural phenomena (which traditionally included hurricanes). Therefore, greater attribution of hurricanes to anthropogenic climate change has a potential to promote helping behavior and environmental support in general. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.