In an effort to understand what motivates people to attend to information about flood risks, this study applies the Risk Information Seeking and Processing model to explore how local residents responded to damaging river flooding in the Milwaukee area. The results indicate that anger at managing agencies was associated with the desire for information and active information seeking and processing, as well as with greater risk judgment of harm from future flooding, greater sense of personal efficacy, lower institutional trust, and causal attributions for flood losses as being due to poor government management.

The model of risk information seeking and processing (RISP) proposes characteristics of individuals that might predispose them to seek risk information. The intent of this study is to test the model's robustness across two independent samples in different nations. Based on data from the United States and the Netherlands, the causal structure involving the impact of different predictors of seeking information was evaluated. In addition, the direct contributions of informational subjective norms and affective responses to the seeking of additional risk information were tested. Results indicate that the RISP model has international validity and that the newly proposed paths are plausible.

Although a great deal of research has linked both self-efficacy and social trust to risk responses, one overlooked question concerns the association between selfefficacy and institutional trust. The purpose of this study was to investigate the main and combined effects of trust in the self and trust in responsible agencies to affective responses and information sufficiency. Survey respondents in this study were placed into one of four categories based on their levels of self-efficacy (high/ low) and social trust (high/low), including confidence, independence, dependence and insecure groups. Based on survey data (n5466), the accuracy of the fourgroup classification was tested. Indeed, we found that our classification system correlated with responses. Both self-efficacy and institutional trust were found to contribute to emotional risk responses, as well as risk information needs and preferences for risk information.

Bennett, p. (1999). Understanding responses to risk: some Basic findings. in p. Bennett and k. calman (eds.).