Shaping an “Earthquake Culture” Through Informal Learning
Principal Investigator: Liz Safran (ENVS), in collaboration with Erik Nilsen (PSY)
The Pacific Northwest is ill-prepared for the impending subduction zone earthquake because the last one struck before Euro-American settlement. Traditional messaging promoting disaster preparation, typically simple and repetitive, neglects strong circumstance dependency of appropriate actions. Narrative-based messaging can help deliver nuanced messages to diverse audiences, overcome resistance to conventional advertising, and make salient what we’ve never experienced. Building on studies of framing, source-trust, and entertainment-education, we will first map out a multi-media campaign whose imaginary but information-rich narrative arc spans the future Cascadia event and then begin to develop and test the psychological efficacy of some pilot media pieces.
Prerequisites: PSY 300: Psychology Methodology OR ENVS 220: Environmental Analysis.