Alone in the disaster? The independent nature of behavioural instructions for evacuation

Abstract

In disaster evacuation, the most reasonable reaction is seen as to evacuate through independence. On the contrary, people often stay and behave socially interdependent, hence stressing the gap between evacuation instructions and actual people's behaviour. The present research analyses the content of a set of behavioural instructions and provides an overview of common framing of evacuation communication. That is informed by psychological models that explain behaviour based distinguish between the independent self (i.e., everyone for themselves) and interdependent self (i.e., all together). Results of this article highlight that, despite the prevalence of interdependent behaviour, most of the instructions focuses on the independent behaviours rather than on interdependent instructions that do not reflect actual people's behaviour in case of evacuation. The objective of this article is to increase authorities' awareness on the relation between existing instructions (independent) and actual behaviour (interdependent); the final aim is to help authorities to design and create better instructional communication campaign for disaster evacuation.