JK: Are you aware of any research that examines how people respond to imagined situations versus situations they have experienced personally?
GWP: Yes, we do know that imagined versus experienced situations matter. People’s unique experience of a situation matters, as well.
When I was doing interviews with individuals who were impacted by Superstorm Sandy in New Jersey, I spoke with a woman who had lost everything. It struck me when she said there was no way she could have imagined the unimaginable before the storm—she’d had no idea how bad it would be. She thought she did know, but she just did not and could not have. She told me that if there was some way to help people really imagine the worst, it would be so valuable.
If an individual has lived through a hurricane and nothing bad happened, their perception of the risk of the event decreases over time. This makes logical sense: if nothing bad happened to you, then you think the next time won’t be so bad, either, whereas individuals who do suffer severe loss or damage have higher perceived risk. In the case of COVID-19, it is not hypothetical—it is a real situation for everyone.
Right now, we’re pulling resources together to run a study that asks similar questions in California among people who are actually being affected by wildfires, because getting those insights would be important.
Political Party Affiliation Can Influence Disaster Preparedness
JK: Do you think wildfire preparedness is an arena that might be less politicized than others?
GWP: We do tend to see differences with respect to disaster preparedness across a variety of different hazards and people’s self-reported political party identification. With a quick glance at the data, it seems there is a difference between mask-wearing in response to wildfire smoke between people who identify as Democrats or Republicans—with Democrats more likely to wear one.
JK: Your survey interviewing was happening when mask-wearing had a political tinge to it. Do you think the politicization of mask-wearing regarding COVID-19 might have influenced mask-wearing for wildfires?
GWP: It would have been great if we could have asked the question about mask-wearing and wildfires last year. But yes, it seems like mask-wearing for wildfires has been changed by the conversation we've been having around COVID-19 and masks.
JK: Do people who identify as Republicans hold different views of disaster preparedness than do people who identify as Democrats?
GWP: Looking at some of my work on hurricane preparedness, I’ve found that preparedness does not always fall along party lines. In some of our studies, Democrats are more likely to see the federal government as responsible for helping to rebuild after hurricane events, and that the federal government should be responsible for helping people to prepare. Whereas people who identify as conservative are less likely to believe that.
We haven't seen real differences in terms of the level of preparedness across party lines—we’ve seen differences more along the lines of a sense of responsibility.
Empirical Data Should Inform Leadership and Public Policy
JK: With the wildfires, many people living near one another have been trying to protect themselves at the same time. This demand has caused a six-week waiting period for the delivery of masks that people purchased, for example. Have you observed—whether in the literature or from your own research and thinking—that people feel completely helpless when they are not able to access the resources they know could help them, or simply from being paralyzed by anxiety?
GWP: We have seen in many instances that people need to feel proactive and as though they are doing something to help themselves.
For example, individuals who were impacted by the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, were doing things like dipping rags into water and wearing them on their faces to protect against wildfire smoke. These were individuals who had to work outside, who didn't have the proper equipment and didn't know what to do in the absence of proper equipment—so they improvised. Doing something was a sort of coping mechanism and helped them feel some level of control.