RAPID: Hurricane Harvey, natural disasters, and willingness to help over time

更愿意提供帮助是向飓风等自然灾害受害者提供援助的一个重要来源。这种意愿可转化为提供帮助的直接愿望(例如，捐款)以及支持有助于减轻和适应灾害的政策的长期倾向(纳税人可能为此付出代价)。然而，帮助的意愿可能是个人社会经济地位、人口特征、心理属性、政治意识形态和对气候变化问题的信念之间复杂互动的产物。此外，反弹效应对一些人来说可能是短期的，但对另一些人来说可能是长期的。了解这一关系的复杂性可能会提高社会动员的效率，帮助自然灾害的受害者，并有助于提高环境意识和支持一般的备灾工作。这位调查人员建议对美国具有全国代表性的成年人样本进行两波民意调查。这项调查的目的是调查受访者对飓风(特别是飓风哈维)的反应，并分析个人的态度和帮助意愿是如何随着时间的推移而改变的。以前，学者们建议调查对自然灾害的反应的时间进程，但在飓风和其他此类灾难的背景下，公众舆论的时间维度在很大程度上仍未被探索。拟议的调查设计考察了在个人意识形态偏好(例如，自由派或保守派)、党派/政治认同、心理特征(例如，采取观点、社会期望偏差)、行为倾向(例如，风险偏好、未来折扣)和社会环境(例如，是否存在有形的社会支持)的背景下，对灾害受害者的同情心可能恶化。该项目的一个重要目标是确定在什么条件下帮助行为最稳定，在什么条件下帮助行为最脆弱和短暂。以前的研究表明，如果灾害的责任可以归因于人为行为(例如，政府)，而不是自然现象(传统上包括飓风)，那么提供帮助的意愿就会增加。因此，更多地将飓风归因于人为气候变化有可能促进总体上的帮助行为和环境支持。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Greater willingness to help is an important source of assistance to victims of natural disasters such as hurricanes. Such willingness may translate into immediate desire to help (e.g., donate money) as well as the long-term propensity to support policies contributing to disaster mitigation and adaptation (at a possible cost to tax-payers). Willingness to help, however, may be a product of complex interaction between individual socioeconomic status, demographic characteristics, psychological attributes, political ideology, and beliefs about the issue of climate change. Moreover, the rally effect may be short-term for some but long-term for others. Understanding the complexity of this relationship may increase efficiency of social mobilization to help victims of natural disasters and contribute to greater environmental awareness and support for natural disaster preparedness in general. The investigator proposes to conduct a two-wave survey of public opinion on a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States. The goal of the survey is to examine respondents' reactions to hurricanes (specifically, Hurricane Harvey) and analyze how individual attitudes and willingness to help change over time.Previously, scholars suggested investigating the time course of reactions to natural disasters but the temporal dimension of public opinion in the context of hurricanes and other such disasters remains largely unexplored. The proposed survey design examines possible deterioration of empathetic concern for victims of the disaster in the context of individual ideological preferences (e.g., liberal or conservative), partisan/political identification, psychological traits (e.g., perspective taking, social desirability bias), behavioral propensities (e.g., risk preferences, future discounting), and social environment (e.g., existence of tangible social support). An important goal of the project is to establish under which conditions helping behavior is most stable and under which it is most fragile and short-lived. Previous research has shown that willingness to help increases if responsibility for disasters could be attributed to human actions (e.g., government), not natural phenomena (which traditionally included hurricanes). Therefore, greater attribution of hurricanes to anthropogenic climate change has a potential to promote helping behavior and environmental support in general.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.