A Risk-Scrutinizing Attitude is Independent of Risk-Sensitive Attitude and May Hamper a Proper Protective Response: A Tsunami Simulation Experiment

In decision making related to protective action against hazard risk, scrutinization of hazard-related information seems favorable for accurate risk evaluation. It is, however, unknown how such a risk-scrutiny attitude is related to sensitivity in risk perception or the difference in the types of information (e.g., sensory vs. numerical). Furthermore, how these attitudes are related to evacuation-prone individual factors, which may inform the psychological mechanisms of these attitudes, remains unknown. To address these questions, we conducted an online experiment (n = 1,200) using evacuation decision-making task with 40 earthquake scenarios where tsunami risks were manipulated using sensory or numerical information. Factor analysis identified risk-sensitive attitude, risk-scrutiny attitude, and sensitivity to sensory (vs. numerical) information. Risk-sensitive attitude was positively related to a evacuation-prone trait, that is emotion regulation, while risk-scrutiny attitude was negatively related to another evacuation-prone trait, leadership. The results demonstrated the independence of risk-scrutiny attitude from risk-sensitive attitude, as well as their independence from information types. Importantly, our results supported the notion that the suppression of optimistic bias is critical for risk-sensitive attitude and that the motivation to resolve the cognitive dissonance may underlie the risk-scrutiny attitude and delayed protective response. The current results have implications for psychological theories of protective decision making and development of disaster communication and education systems for tsunami and potentially other types of disasters.