Our Sydney office Founder, Mike Daniels, recently gave the keynote speech at the 2016 Australian Community Engagement and Fire Awareness (ACEFA) Conference.
Bushfires are very common in Australia, particularly in the hot, dry summer months and often lead to loss of lives and property damage.
Mike talked about the work our Sydney office has been conducting with the NSW Rural Fire Service to improve community engagement and preparedness for bushfires, presenting on The Behavioural Architects' involvement in the recent review of the Guide to Making a Bush Fire Survival Plan.
He looked at how key behavioural economics principles informed the analysis, optimisation, and testing process to ensure that the materials provided by the Guide would have the most significant impact on such an important behaviour, crucial for people's survival.
People are often not as prepared for bushfires as they can be, due to cognitive biases such as present bias and optimism bias (see image below).Therefore simply providing access to information and education on bushfires is not enough to generate action and true preparedness. Mike warned:
"Education [about bushfires] is overrated. We have got to get people to do things."
Our recommendations recognised the influence of biases such as these and focused on generating action and real behaviour change.
You can read the NSW Rural Fire Service plan here.
Why don't we plan for bushfires? Considering concepts from behavioural science can help to explain.