CAREER: Evolution of Collective Disaster Memory: A Dynamic Behavioral and Systems Analysis toward Community Resilience

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People recollect and share information about past natural disasters. A cultural trait known as collective disaster memory emerges when such information is widely shared among contemporaries or passed down to subsequent generations through conversations, historical texts, or built environment features. Although collective memory has a potential to significantly shape people’s vulnerability/ defense to future similar events through changes in their preparations and ways of thinking, there is a lack of empirical understanding of under what set of conditions disaster memories can be collectively forgotten or sustained over multiple generations. This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award supports research to study this puzzle in the context of flood hazards, flood memory, and the built environment for flood protection. Multiple methods, comprised of surveys and case studies based in distinct risk settings (Portland, Oregon and Houston, Texas) and human-subject behavioral experiments, will be used to test hypotheses related to explaining variation in the durability of collective disaster memory. Based on the empirical data, system-level models will be developed to computationally test how different forms of memory transmission and people’s adaptations affect the dynamics of collective memory and regional vulnerability in different environmental and social settings. The project will also contribute to education in two ways: developing a new method and tools for evaluation of students’ learning about social and collective memory implications of civil engineering; and offering education and training opportunities for the next-generation workforce in disaster science and resilience studies through mentored research experiences and new course modules. This project will address two key questions: 1) how different configurations of memory transmission forms and physical and social contextual factors will lead to differences in the durability of collective flood memory and 2) how the state of such memory, in turn, affects people’s collective action to deal with future flood events. This will be achieved through a multi-method approach comprised of behavioral experiments, surveys and case data collection, and systems modeling. The research will begin with case studies of two distinct areas (Portland, Oregon and Houston, Texas) to generate case specific insights, identifying the details of each area’s historical flood events and their memories. A survey will be conducted in each case area with the representative random sample of the general public to assess the current collective memory states of the historical floods and how people learned about them. This will be followed by controlled behavioral experiments with different populations to test effects of different forms of memory or cultural transmission on the durability of collective memory and group ability to solve a collective-risk social dilemma framed as a public levee maintenance problem. The resulting empirical findings will be compared and triangulated for the generality and transferability of the results. Finally, generic system-level models of collective memory dynamics in a prototypical human-flood system will be developed and tested for synthesis and generalizable understanding. This project is expected to lead to new knowledge, tools, and research trajectory for disaster science and resilience studies that consider the effects of collective disaster memory and its interplay with built and social environmental features. The project’s significance lies in its rigorous experimental and modeling work that seeks to disentangle and test unresolved hypotheses related to the relationship among the durability of disaster memory, different forms of cultural transmission, infrastructure and hazard attributes, and underlying social structures.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.