“Disasters” are always present in our lives, such as major earthquakes, wind and flood damage caused by heavy rains and typhoons, volcanic eruptions, train accidents, and various traffic accidents.
How people perceive such natural and man-made disasters, and how they behave when they encounter disasters. Disaster psychology seeks to provide responses and countermeasures to avoid disasters and minimize the damage caused by disasters.
In this column, I will introduce how people tend to act in emergency situations such as disasters, or in other words, the psychological biases (like tendencies, biases, habits) that people tend to take. .Even just being aware of this bias in advance can help you in times of need.
It has been found that when we humans perceive our surroundings, we actually use two types of perception: "fast perception" and "slow perception."There are two types: "System 2", which recognizes the situation quickly and intuitively, and "System 1", which takes some time to carefully examine the information and recognize the situation logically.
When you encounter an emergency situation, you need to make a quick decision, so you will use "System 1" to take some kind of response action.You might think that it's a quick decision, so it's a quick escape, but it's actually not that easy.
For example, even if an emergency bell suddenly rings in a train station or underground mall where many people are walking, people do not immediately try to escape, saying, "This may be an evacuation drill," It seems that nothing is happening."
This is one of the psychological habits called “normalcy bias”.Thinking that you will be okay has the effect of giving you a sense of security for the time being, but when a crisis is really imminent, it may lead to the result that you will not be able to escape.
Accompanying this is “tuning bias”.When there are people around you, not just yourself, it is a habit to first refer to the actions of others and go along with them.
If people take the action of running away, they will follow along and run away together, and conversely, if people do not run away and just wait and see, they will follow along and stay where they are.
If conformity bias is added to normality bias, there is a possibility that behavior will be greatly biased due to double bias.
There are a number of other psychological biases that can significantly affect emergency behavior, but that's a topic for another time.
