Emotion and Individual Reasoning about Crises and Disasters

Abstract

This dissertation advances our understanding of the way that individuals think about and respond to natural and anthropogenic disasters. I accomplish this by way of theoretical specification and empirical testing. With respect to theory, I build upon recent research on the relationship between affect, risk, and decision- making to hypothesize that the specific emotions (i.e., fear, anger, sadness) that individuals experience when confronted with a crisis or disaster orient the way in which they think about and respond to the situation. Moreover, I propose that the specific emotions people experience in response to a crisis or disaster are not entirely stochastic; rather, different groups of people are predisposed to experience different emotions when encountering the same situation. After deriving these propositions from the literature I subject them to empirical testing by asking survey respondents to think about and respond to a hypothetical disaster wherein the United States suffers a devastating nuclear attack. In all, I find evidence in support of three propositions: 1) affect influences the way in which people think about disasters; 2) discrete emotions of the same valence (like anger, sadness, and fear) differentially impact individual responses to disasters; 3) different groups of people (as defined by shared cultural and socio- biological attributes) are predisposed to experience different emotions when given the same information about a crisis or disaster.