If your first instinct when hearing of a storm approaching is assuming it won’t be that bad, you need to rethink your strategy.
Unfortunately, storms, earthquakes and a whole range of other catastrophes are inevitable in certain regions, but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer the brunt of it. Along with being physically prepared, including stocking up on flashlights and bread, those in disaster-prone areas (and even those who don’t think they are) must be mentally prepared, said Howard Kunreuther and Robert Meyer, co-directors of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It’s always good to review your home insurance policy if you haven’t done so in a while, and report home improvement projects since you might otherwise run the risk of being underinsured.
In the pair’s new book, “The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters” (published by Wharton Digital Press), coming out on Feb. 7, they mention biases that deter people from appropriate disaster planning.
The U.S. has more natural disasters than any other country, a 2015 United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction report found, and 43% of homes in the U.S. are at high risk of natural disasters, according to another 2015 report from real estate research firm RealtyTrac.
Kunreuther and Meyer spoke with MarketWatch about how to develop strategies for surviving disasters.
MarketWatch: So you say people are underprepared for disasters — why is that?
Robert Meyer: We tend to be overly optimistic when we think of bad things happening, that it will happen to other people and not ourselves. It is very difficult to see the long-term benefits from making big investments in protection — if you have to put a lot of money in building a safer house, the likelihood is you won’t see a real benefit from that on a year to year basis.
MarketWatch: You mention six biases, including myopia and inertia. Can you briefly explain them?
‘It is good to be an optimist, it’s just not good to be an optimist when a storm is coming.’
Meyer: Myopia is the tendency to have difficulty understanding of the long term consequences of things; the second one is amnesia, which is the tendency to quickly forget things that happen to us in the past, and you see this all the time whether it’s on Wall Street or a disaster. This is a deeply human trait. And the third is optimism, which is this idea people tend to underestimate the probabilities of risk.
Howard Kunreuther: The fourth one is inertia, and this is a very common bias where we maintain what we are currently doing — so if they haven’t protected themselves they will continue to not protect themselves until something happens. The fifth bias is simplification, where we don’t tend to look at all of the information that could be on the table and have a hard time thinking about probabilities here. And the last is herding, where we look at others for guidance on how to make decisions.
MarketWatch: Given that, will we ever learn from past experiences?
Meyer: Probably not. In some sense, these biases are not easily correctable, and we talk about them being negative but they’re only negative when applied to making decisions with very risky events. Howard mentioned herding — in most walks of life, there is value of imitating what someone else is doing. It is good to be an optimist, it’s just not good to be an optimist when a storm is coming.
MarketWatch: There are so many natural disasters that are terrifying and heartbreaking. Are there any you think back on where the impact of the damage could have been avoided?
Kunreuther: One is Hurricane Katrina, which is now 12 years old but we don’t forget because of the incredible damage. The more recent is Hurricane Sandy that hit New York. (The two wrote in their book that taking preventive action falls on the shoulders of policymakers as well as those affected, and argue there needs to be stronger policies, regulations and tax incentives to support better decision-making. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the government was highly criticized for being unprepared before and after the storm, according to a 2006 report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs).
Meyer: Those were classic cases of people forgetting, because hurricanes are not things that are unpredictable events. Hurricanes we know every 30 years make major impacts on the Northeast and the Gulf Coast. We just had a long period of not having a hurricane and they pretended they didn’t exist.
MarketWatch: So what can we do right now to be prepared during the next disaster?
Meyer: For an individual homeowner, knowing you have these biases is very helpful to plan around them. One example, with amnesia, is when a hurricane comes through and you don’t buy enough supplies and then you don’t think the power would be out very long and have a totally miserable experience. What tends to happen is you’ll remember the event but you forget how painful it was to go two weeks without electricity. And if you don’t remember it being quite as bad, you’re inclined not to stock up, so put down rules in place for the home when a storm is coming. And remember you’re most poised to take corrective actions after the disaster occurs.
This article originally appeared on Marketwatch.
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