Behavioral Nudges in a Wildfire Risk Context: Social Comparison and Community Type

每年扑灭野火要花费数十亿美元，但它们仍然摧毁生命、社区和生态系统。政府和其他实体大力投资，支持减轻私有财产的野火风险，并向公众提供相关教育。本项目调查了一种相对低成本的方法的有效性，以增加公民对这些努力的参与，潜在地提高其有效性。具体而言，该项目涉及一项实验，检查在外联材料中纳入不同类型的野火风险评估信息（社区级、包裹级、比较级）对人们行为的影响程度。实验还将调查包含个性化和社会比较信息的行为影响。实验中测量的行为结果反映了全国范围内减少风险教育和外展工作旨在促进的行为类型。如果发现有效，所研究的方法可以在与一系列危害相关的包裹级风险评估存在的其他领域实施。实验设计将不同的信息处理应用于直接邮寄，鼓励居民访问从业者提供的多种信息来源，包括当地社区会议。这种设计允许探索如何利用现有的偏见来鼓励对个人、社会和环境有益的行为。从寻求风险信息到缓解活动，将在不同的社区类型中衡量涉及个性化和社会比较的推动所产生的行为结果，以评估社会背景在这些结果中所起的作用。重要的是，该项目建立在独特的研究人员与实践者合作的基础上，在荒地与城市交界的社区进行研究，那里的居民面临着与野火相关的高风险损失。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。

Wildfires cost billions of dollars to suppress annually, yet they still devastate lives, communities, and ecosystems. The government and other entities invest significantly in supporting wildfire risk mitigation on private property and related education to the public. This project investigates the efficacy of a relatively low-cost approach to increase citizens' engagement with these efforts, potentially increasing their effectiveness. Specifically, the project involves an experiment examining the extent to which including different types of wildfire risk assessment information (community-level, parcel-level, comparative) in the outreach material influences peoples' behavior. The experiment will also investigate the behavioral effects of including personalized and social comparison information. The behavioral outcomes measured in the experiment reflect the kinds of behaviors risk reduction education and outreach efforts across the nation are intended to promote. If found effective, the studied approach could be implemented in other areas where parcel level risk assessments exist, related to a range of hazards.The experimental design applies different information treatments to direct mailings that encourages residents to access multiple sources of information provided by practitioners, including local community meetings. This design allows exploration of how existing biases may be leveraged to encourage behaviors that are individually, socially, and environmentally beneficial. From risk information seeking to mitigation activities, the behavioral outcomes that result from nudges involving personalization and social comparison will be measured across different community types in order to assess the role social context plays in such outcomes. Importantly, the project builds on a unique researcher-practitioner collaboration to conduct the study in communities in the wildland-urban interface, where residents face high risk of wildfire-related losses.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.