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

更大的帮助意愿是向飓风等自然灾害受害者提供援助的重要来源。这种意愿可能转化为立即提供帮助的愿望（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（这可能使纳税人付出代价）。然而，帮助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相互作用的产物。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。了解这种关系的复杂性可以提高社会动员的效率，以帮助自然灾害的受害者，并有助于提高对环境的认识和对一般自然灾害防备工作的支持。研究者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。调查的目的是检查受访者对飓风（特别是飓风哈维）的反应，并分析个人的态度和帮助意愿如何随着时间的推移而变化。此前，学者们建议调查人们对自然灾害反应的时间过程，但在飓风和其他此类灾害的背景下，公众舆论的时间维度仍未得到很大程度的探索。建议的调查设计在个人意识形态偏好（例如，自由或保守）、党派/政治认同、心理特征（例如，观点接受、社会可取性偏见）、行为倾向（例如，风险偏好、未来贴现）和社会环境（例如，有形社会支持的存在）的背景下，检验对灾难受害者的共情关怀可能恶化的情况。该项目的一个重要目标是确定在哪些条件下帮助行为是最稳定的，在哪些条件下帮助行为是最脆弱和短暂的。先前的研究表明，如果灾难的责任可以归因于人类行为（例如，政府），而不是自然现象（传统上包括飓风），那么帮助的意愿就会增加。因此，将飓风更多地归因于人为气候变化有可能在总体上促进帮助行为和环境支持。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.