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Effects of Time Pressure on Behavioural Decision Making in Natural Disasters: Based on an Online Experimental System

Yu M, Zhu T and Donaldson S

This paper aims to examine the effects of time pressure on the behavioral decision-making process and outcome to responding a natural disaster, via an online experimental system with simulated typhoon disaster scenario. As decision strategies determine the cognitive processing of decision, we set up a simple approach to recognize them according to previous researches. After investigating with emergency personnel, we develop the disaster decision making system and conduct experiments. Sixty participants (by two groups) make an emergency relief decision via the system with/without time pressure. Based on process tracing technology of Information Display Board, decision strategies and cognitive load are measured to make comparisons between different conditions. The results show that time pressure has a bad impact on decision performance and makes participants use more decision strategies by attribute-based rule to avoid conflicts between attributes of each alternative. With comparisons of variation for cognitive load, we find that time pressure occupies the cognitive resource of emergency decision makers, who are forced to monitor and cope with it. Therefore, they have to reduce cognitive effort on decision-making process, leading to dissatisfactory decision results. Besides, the effects of time pressure on different decision strategies are also discussed in this paper.