Political science’s Wilson researces hurricane evacuees; behavior

Political science’s Wilson researches hurricane evacuees’ behavior

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

The media’s portrayal of Hurricane Katrina evacuees as anarchists, looters and rapists bothered Rick Wilson, chair of Rice’s Department of Political Science.

“My sense was that that’s an unusual way to think of how people respond in a crisis,” said Wilson, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science and professor of statistics and of psychology. “Most people tend to cooperate with one another, and I think most evacuees behaved differently than they were painted in news reports.”

To get a more scientific grasp of the evacuees’ behavior and how it changes in the aftermath of the evacuation, Wilson is using a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study evacuees in a series of behavioral experiments from which they can benefit financially. NSF approved his application for a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) within hours because of the timely nature of his research.

“To study the impact of dislocation of citizens over time, it was important that the first wave of research be conducted while the evacuees are having to live among strangers in shelters around Houston,” Wilson said.

His study uses individual risk measures, measures of cooperation derived from behavioral economics, and questionnaires focusing on past experiences and current attitudes toward the evacuation and current living conditions.

About 350 adult evacuees at Houston-area shelters were asked to participate in the study, which entails behavioral games that explore the nature of cooperation and fairness among strangers in settings where they have no strong interpersonal networks. Participants are given cash and then asked to make behavioral social decisions about how much to share with other participants.

One game measures perception of individual fairness. For example, an evacuee is given 10 $1 bills and 10 blank pieces of paper. The evacuee places a combination of bills and blanks in an envelope to keep and the remainder in an envelope to be given to another study participant. This exercise, commonly known as the “dictator game,” tracks how much money people are willing to send to others.

Another game measures social cooperation. For that component of the study, the evacuee is again given $10 and asked to decide how much (if any) to keep and how much to put into a community pot, which will be doubled and then distributed equally to everyone in the study, even if they don’t contribute to the pot. Although the group would be much better off if everyone contributes their $10, an individual stands to gain more by keeping the original $10 while collecting a portion of the community pot.

These experiments will help Wilson analyze the levels of cooperation and conflict among strangers who have been dislocated during an emergency. He will also examine the levels of trust that individuals have for others within their group and for the agencies working with them.

The research was conducted at both small shelters and at larger facilities like the George R. Brown Convention Center so that Wilson can determine whether levels of group cooperation and trust are affected by the size of the evacuation center.
Wilson plans to conduct the tests again one month and a few months from now to evaluate whether the evacuees’ behavior changes as they get settled into a routine and begin to rebuild their lives. Because of the difficulty of tracking the study participants after they leave the shelters, the same people will not be used for the subsequent studies. But each wave of the study will involve 350 to 400 participants.

In addition to playing the behavioral games, participants completed a questionnaire designed by Rice’s Robert Stein and colleagues. Stein is dean of social sciences and the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science. The questionnaire asked for demographic information and details about when and how the participant evacuated and where they’ve been staying.

Wilson, principal investigator of the SGER-funded study, hired five evacuees to help Rice graduate and undergraduate students who are working on the study with him.

He said evacuees have been “ecstatic” to participate because they get to keep the money earned during the behavioral games. Depending on the choices made during the games, the take-home pay has ranged from $15 to $90, with most earning around $60, Wilson said.

With the first wave of research just completed, Wilson hopes to analyze the results and submit them to a scientific journal.