NEAR-MISS EFFECT ON INDIVIDUALS' PERCEPTION OF FLOODING RISK AND PROTECTIVE RESPONSES

Climate change has been linked with an increase in flood hazard in many regions; thus, models estimating risk for urban areas will become increasingly important. However, these models generally disregard psychological variables likely to affect human responses to risk, exposure and vulnerability. The present contribution aimed to (i) explore how some cognitive processes affect lay people flood risk perception and mitigation behavior; (ii) integrate such psychological parameters in models assessing the potential consequences of the flood events. More specifically, the work focused on the near-miss effect that is the human tendency to underestimate present and future risks when a previous negative outcome is avoided by chance. In Study 1 (N = 225), the near-miss event was experimentally manipulated through a fictitious scenario; then, risk perception and behavioral intentions were assessed among inhabitants of both flood-prone and low flood risk areas. In Study 2, a series of agent-based models simulating a neighborhood in a flood-prone area was implemented, in which artificial households had to decide whether to purchase insurance against flood-related damage. The agents’ decision-making process was driven by parameters estimated in the prior experiment. The results showed that, if compared to the control condition, participants in near-miss condition perceived a lower level of risk and, consequently, were less prone to adopt protective measures. Moreover, the agent-based models integrating the psychological variables showed that such an underestimation of the flooding likelihood is likely to increase the expected damages caused by the natural disaster. Overall, our work suggests that psychologically-refined models might serve as a solid basis for investigating the influence of subjective risk on objective risk. Such models could become increasingly useful in the future to support flood risk analysis and to inform households, insurers, policy-makers.