As hurricane Florence spirals her way towards the Carolina
coast, all the weather prognosticators are predicting massive waves, winds, and
disaster. The storm is expected to wreak havoc with North and South Carolina,
as well as Virginia. This is supposed to be a super storm to end all super
storms. The state and local governments have declared mandatory evacuations and
the weird sight of all lanes of traffic heading in only one direction is
filling up the screens.
But, there are also people who are defiantly staying,
managing to hoard bottle water, batteries, food and fuel and hunkering down in
their homesteads. The news outlets are of course focusing on some of these
people. While not overtly lauding them for the independence and their
expressions of rugged individualism that American society find so commendable,
the tone of the reports all seem to observe the action of these folks as an act
of defiance in the face of officialdom and the inevitable acts of nature.
In some ways they are putting the lives of potential
rescuers in peril if they end up changing their minds, usually at the worst
time, i.e. when the options for evacuating them are nonexistent, even though the
rescuers are always willing to put themselves on the line to save another human
from certain peril.
The thing that I find interesting is the decision making process
that these folks undergo in order to make that decision. The primal
consideration might be driven by the fear of forever losing what they had. This
thought process elicits in me the Stoic tenet and nothing is forever, and that
material things are transient and temporary. Losing material things seem to be
an inconsequential consideration when compared to a life.
Another consideration is the idea of a personal probability.
The idea is that people have an ability to calculate a personal probability of
failure or success for different situations. In this case, and I am projecting
my own prejudices on this conjecture, that they probably have a belief in that
nothing can happen to them because they are who they are, or that they have
such abilities that they are able to survive the natural forces of our world.
In short, they have the hubris to believe that they are immune to the forces of
nature, whether it is by their won ego or by their belief in their
capabilities, so they put a thumb on the scales of survival and increase their
personal probability of survival.
Another way to look at it is that they are risk averse in
their own way. People behave differently when faced with the same option but presented
differently, as Kahneman and Tversky had discovered through their work. Given
the same circumstance, people will inevitably be more conservative in their
decision making if the proposition is made in terms of potential losses,
whereas they will tend to be more aggressive if the proposition is made in
terms of potential gains. Although the options of either losing a house versus
gaining a life seem to be clear cut to me, it may not be to them, and their
defensive response is to be conservative in terms of clinging to what they have
materially. Of course coupling the aforementioned biases in the calculation of
the personal probability in combination with the human proclivity to respond to
more drastically to losses may explain this.
