People's post-disaster decisions and their relations with personality traits and decision-making styles: The choice of travel mode and healthcare destination

Abstract

Human behavior after disasters is crucial to disaster management and resilience studies. Understanding the relationships between individuals' decisions, their decision-making styles, and personality traits may explain why people respond differently to post-disaster situations and bring us a better understanding of how people would react after a disaster. Using data from an online survey with 536 responses among residents of Tehran, this study performed multiple linear regression analyses to explore the relations between personality and decision-making styles with the preference for self-presentation to hospitals and the factors influencing their choices of hospitals after a disaster. The results showed that 36.2% of the participants preferred self-presentation, and 47.4% reported that their primary reason for choosing self-presentation over calling an ambulance was fear of losing the injured. 89.5% believed that earthquake in Tehran is dangerous. The most influential factor in respondents' choice of hospital was “Less distant,” chosen by 81.5%. Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between preference for self-presentation and risk perception. Among the influence of hospital selection factors, multiple regression analysis showed a positive prediction of proximity by neuroticism; reputation, services, and accessibility by affective decision-making; and reputation and accessibility by rational decision-making. These results highlighted the importance of individual differences in reacting to extreme conditions after a disaster and provided important information about the predictors of post-disaster decisions. These results could be used in quantitative models to predict post-disaster demands for each hospital, demands for roads heading to it, and patients' waiting time.