Research On Effects Of Emergency Behavioral Decision Making In Contingency Response

Disasters, especially natural disasters, occur more frequently in contemporary human society. They happen fast and have great destructive power, even cause derivative disasters and more complex circumstances wiithout appropriate emergency in time. However, it could be failed to control the situation in the disaster site, because the uncertainty and specificity of some disasters made preparedness unavailable, or unexpected situations were lack of prepared plans to deal with.In that case, the problem solving probably relied on correct behavioral decisions made with emergency personnel’s subjective judgments.To achieve these goals, the author first integrated emergency management and cognitive psychology theories about decision-making, then analysed the characteristics of emergencies in disasters and psychological factors in responding to them, turns out that time pressure, fuzzy information and emotions woule be the source of stress in emergency decision making. Concidering those factors, a behavioral decision making process model to responding disaster emergencies was built up to clarify the working logic of psychological fators in cognitive decision making process. With Information Display Board technology the author improved a discrimination methods to distingguish decision rules and strategies, which reveal different decision process. To make mutual verification with the discrimination, this research also developed a visual dynamic presentation module of the decision making process, to analyze the effects of psychological factors on processes and results of emergency decision making.Secondly, the paper designed typhoons scenario and decision-making problem, then calculated its solution set through the mathematical model, as the evaluation criteria of behavioral decision making results. This author also developed online experiement system, and invited nearly five hundred emergency decision makers to participate in the experiments,who were from state gird in those four cities of Shenzhen, Beijing, Harbin and Qitaihe, reveived 182 valid samples. With these datas, this research demonstrated the impacts of time pressure, fuzzy information and emotions on behavioral decision making processes and results. Besides, in the perspective of cognitive load theory, the author tested the variation of cognitive efforts during decision process under different factors, to revral their roles in decisions.The experiments of time pressure effects found out that:(1) time pressure reduced the quality of decisions, decison makers were more inclined to attribute-based decision strategies.(2) time pressure increased the cognitive load of participants who used compensatory decision rule, it made the non-compensatory rule users to shorten decision making process and made immature decisions.(3) The effect of time pressure was the most obvious for Additive Difference strategy users, it made a great influence on decision quality.The experiments of fuzzy information effects found out that:(1) fuzzy information reduced the quality of decisions, but it made more decision-makers use compensatory decision rules with deliberate informatiion processing.(2) data analysis revealed that, decision-makers with high need for cognitive closure tended to pursue too many details at the cost of efficiency in the decision process; the ones with medium need for cognitive closure were likely to estimate the fuzzy information first, then made other information processing; the others with low need for cognitive closure tended to tolerate the fuzzy information while processing decision informations, and they evaluated it until the final decisions.The experiments of the dual-factor environment effects found out that:(1) compared to the previous two experiments, the quality of decision making in dual-factor environments were the worst, non-compensatory decision rules adopted by emergency decision makers increased significantly.(2) The dual-factor environment had most impacts on paricipants with high need for cognitive closure, and it depleted their cognitive loads in the decision making process; time pressure pushed the decision makers with low and medium need for cognitive closure to process information more deliberately, and concentrated to solve the decision problem, and it turned out an improvement on the quality of decision outcomes.The experiments of emotion intervention found out that:(1) positive and negative emotion interventions reduced the quality of the behavioral decision outcomes.(2) decision makers were more likely to use compensatory decision rules in both positive and negative emotion interventions.(3) Positive and negative emotions had interfered with the decision-making process, asked higher cognitive load, but the quality of decision under negative emotions was lower than that of positive emotions. It revealed that coping with negative emotions needed more cognitive resources than the that of positive emotions.Based on the above experimental conclusions, the author proposed adjustment suggestions of behavioral decision making to emergency response in disasters, emergency decisions were made adaptively considering psychological and behavioral characteristics of decision makers. Then according to online system developing application, the author designed a behavior prompts methods for emergency decision support system.