How Disaster Prevention Videos Contribute to Tsunami Evacuation: Subjective Motivation and Risk-Sensitive Attitude in a Simulation Experiment

Videos are commonly used in disaster prevention education or communication. Some consider behavioral recommendations to have more motivating content than hazard mechanisms; these, however, have not been empirically tested. Perception of hazard risk is mediated by risk-sensitive and risk-scrutiny attitudes, but which attitude the videos influence has not been examined. In Experiment 1, we created sets of videos for two types of content and relevant control videos, and their effects on four motivation measures of the self-oriented model (i.e., self-relevance, attention, self-efficacy, and behavioral intention) were examined in the online survey. In Experiment 2, we compared the intervention effects of disaster prevention and control videos on the pre-post change of two types of attitudes using a scenario-based tsunami evacuation decision-making task. Consequently, disaster-prevention videos (vs. control videos) facilitated the four motivation measures irrespective of the content type and increased the risk-sensitive attitude during the evacuation decision-making from the tsunami. The revealed facilitatory effect of the videos on motivational and risk-sensitive aspects of evacuation response appears to be congruent with previously advocated advantages of videos or films. The current finding offers insights into the process and mechanism of the effect of disaster prevention videos, providing a robust empirical basis for promoting their use in disaster prevention education.