Behavioral Science A-ZExplore the myriad of ingredients that influence
how we see the world and the risks in it
Resilience Requires Behavior Change
Presentation of Data ResilienceChanged behavior
Changing the Conversation – Flood Economics
• Increase decision-makers’
awareness of flood risk and its
relevance to their communities;
• Increase their knowledge of how
to mitigate a community’s flood
risk; and
• Encourage people to share this
knowledge with key industry
experts and affected stakeholders,
creating a ripple effect.
Changing the Conversation - IMMERSED
• Reaching decision makers on
their terms
• Recast how people perceive
risks
• Inspire users to take impactful
mitigation actions:
Invest in flood insurance
Personally mitigate their
properties
Work with their community to
prioritize mitigation
Behavioral Science Building Blocks
Cognitive
Bias
Codex
Behavioral
science affects
everything
that you do
Personalize and Relate
Homophily & Likeability
• “…evaluators implicitly
gravitated toward and
explicitly fought [to hire]
candidates with whom they
felt an emotional spark of
commonality.” – Rivera, 2012
• Hiring without considering
bias historically results in a
50% rate of failure – Harvard
Business Review
Overcoming Homophily & Likeability
• Partner with local
representative or
ambassador
• Demonstrate understanding
of local values & priorities
• Identify natural touch points
• Listen actively
• Be authentic
14
Hyperbolic Discounting & Availability
• Immediate gratification is better than
future gratification, even if the future
payout is more
• Our decisions are swayed by how
easily we can recall an event
occurring.
• We misinterpret the past if we can't
imagine the future.
Overcoming Hyperbolic
Discounting &
Availability
• Frame future risk in
present terms
• Help communities
visualize risk
• Focus on local examples
17
Collaborate
19
Commitment Bias
• You have a 65% of completing a goal if you commit to someone
• If you have a specific accountability appointment with a person you’ve committed,
your chance of success raises to 95% - American Society of Training and
Development (ASTD)
Leveraging Commitment Bias
• Engage influencers early
• Encourage decision makers to be
open & on the record
• Find opportunities for public
commitment to improve resilience
• Set milestones for public updates
• Celebrate progress publicly
Get permission to have a
quote expressing
commitment to use in
outreach materials
22
23
IKEA Effect
“Participants who built a simple IKEA
storage box themselves were willing to
pay much more for the box than a group
of participants who merely inspected a
fully built box.” – Journal of Consumer
Psychology
Leveraging the IKEA Effect
• Encourage and build a
community’s self-efficacy
• Help the community create
a sense of belonging
• Involve them throughout
the entire mapping
process
Equip
Chunking
• Short-term memory only holds about 7 “chunks” of information, which fade from
your brain in about 20 seconds – Nielsen Norman Group
• Our behavior is greatly influenced by what grabs our attention, and we are more
likely to be drawn to things that we can easily encode and process - MINDSPACE
Leveraging the Benefits of Chunking
• Encourage individual community
members to take smaller mitigation
steps by reframing what counts as
“mitigation action”
• Show how each small
step/individual mitigation
project fits into the larger picture
30
Charity Hazard
• When people don’t properly prepare, because they believe the government or
another organization will provide aid when necessary
• If it’s bad enough, someone will help me
Overcoming Charity Hazard
• Norm concrete steps that people
can take to help themselves before a
disaster or flood happens
• Emphasize how quickly a homeowner
can get back to normal with flood
insurance instead of relying on
uncertain government assistance
Now it’s time to try out what you’ve learned
and build self efficacy!
HANDOUT
QUESTIONS
For More Information:
Meg Bartow, Resilience Action Partners
Tom Glenn, FEMA