Seismic engineers and psychologists from the University of British Columbia teamed up with a visual artist to create the image above, which shows what a Vancouver elementary school would look like after a major earthquake.
Seismic engineers and psychologists from the University of British Columbia teamed up with a visual artist to create the image above, which shows what a Vancouver elementary school would look like after a major earthquake. Then, the team tested whether the image would be more effective than statistics in helping people appreciate the risk posed by a major earthquake.
They presented their findings, recently published in the journal Collabra: Psychology, on Friday at the Behavioural Insights in Canada conference in Vancouver. We spoke with Iris Lok, a UBC PhD student in social psychology and the study’s lead author, about the research.
What was the motivation behind this study?
When we started this research, my thesis advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, was getting her son enrolled in kindergarten. She was troubled by how many kindergarteners in B.C. would be heading off to schools that were expected to collapse during a major earthquake. We wanted to figure out how we could harness our knowledge of human psychology to increase public awareness of this issue.
What existing knowledge about risk perception did you bring to the study?
To help people think about risks like earthquakes, the government typically provides abstract, quantitative information such as statistics. But people often make decisions about risks by relying primarily on their gut feelings. This suggests that people might be more likely to care about earthquakes if dry, abstract information were translated into vivid imagery that would affect people on a more emotional level.
Read more at University of British Columbia
Image: An image of a Vancouver elementary school (top), and an artist's rendering of what the same school would look like after a major earthquake. (Credit: UBC Media Relations)
