Anticipatory Responses to Predictable Disasters

Large numbers of people live in areas where disasters or the conditions leading to disasters are a fact of life. In the U.S., flood plains are heavily populated. Hundreds of thousands live in "Tornado Alley." Millions live on the Gulf Coast. Tens of millions live along the San Andreas Fault. How do they cope with the constant threat of disasters?

For most people, the threat of disasters is something like traffic noise – i.e., people get used to the threat, and soon come to ignore it. This is the process psychologists refer to as “habituation”, a process by which people become used and fail to respond to constant stimuli. Wikipedia presents a very familiar example of habituation, noting that a short amount of time after dressing, the stimulus the weight of clothes creates is 'ignored' by the nervous system and we become unaware of it. The same might be said of responses to constant threats of disasters. Over time, people who are exposed on a daily basis to the threat of predictable disasters may come to dismiss or ignore the threat.

It is not hard to see why people might habituate to the threat of a disaster. Consider the case of a family living along the San Andreas fault. They are often reminded of the very real threat of an earthquake, but there might be years or even decades between serious earthquake. Thus, each day, you wake up with the prediction that there will be a terrible earthquake soon, and each night you go to bed knowing that (once again) it did not occur. The paradoxical effect of this constant exposure to the threat of a disaster, without that threat coming true, is that as time goes on, the probability of actually experiencing an earthquake will go up, but the belief that it will occur will go down. One of the challenges facing agencies charged with maintaining public health and public safety may be to get people who are constantly exposed to the threat of a disaster to take that threat seriously and prepare for that threat.

It is important to emphasize that habituation is not a universal response, and that some people living in high-threat areas do indeed take a variety of precautions. It is also important to emphasize that habituation has its advantages. It would not be easy, and perhaps not even possible, to live normal life while constantly worrying about potential disasters. Perhaps the most adaptive response to the threat of predictable disasters is to develop a combination of a healthy respect for the threat together with the ability to put that threat to the back of your mind once realistic preparations have been made.