1. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR BEFORE THE POSIBLE DISASTERS
Jaime Senabre
Director of SINIF
Chairman of the Scientific-Professional Committee of the National Symposium on Forest Fires.
Psychologist and Chief of the Wildland Fire Brigade.

2. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
Possibly, no organization or community has been fully prepared to face all the implications of a disaster (Hodgkinson, 1991).
This statement is perhaps one of the most important challenges of any society.
And although in itself can be a way to justify the vulnerability of human beings, rather it should be taken into account as a motivational aspect, to raise prevention and safety as a subject first order.
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3. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
Today we know that the responses of people in situations of disasters are not disorganized, nor have profound behavioral disorders, but rather continue to be social beings, even in the most difficult conditions for survival.
This aspect has allowed us to understand that people passing by disasters are "normal" people reacting in a manner expected to unexpected or abnormal situation; a claim that has already become a classic in the world of psychology in emergencies.

4. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
Also, over the years it has been to demystify the false belief that panic is the typical behavior of populations.
It also noted the importance of pre-existing levels of social organization and the degree of preparation, to predict the duration of the community response to the disaster.

5. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
Under this same approach we have been developed studies leading to explain how people react to alarms and warnings of emergencies, how the rumor is presented and how to handle the information, in order to neutralize, guide and reassure the public.

6. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
So now we understand that victims of an emergency situation are not only suffering a physical injury or loss of any property, but on the contrary, we find that the concept of victim is broader and can reach extended to all a community.

7. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
Overall, we can say that disasters are a time of life of the societies in which they occur or arise cohesion values, mutual assistance and solidarity, even when they could have been sleepy before the tragedy.
To a disaster should consider framing an explanatory model and place the consequences on people.
It has been thought patterns of crisis and stress as more appropriate, although they may offer a partial insight into such events.

8. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
In that sense, the stress model has the merit of reviving interest in post-traumatic disorders, since an emergency situation is evaluated not only by their causes and physical effects, but their psychological impact on the human group he has suffered or is involved.

9. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
Therefore, knowing how to manage the risks that those influences health in which the individual has little immediate (macro environment) personal control, is one of the tasks of the current psychology, relative to a present and a future.

10. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
Therefore, knowing how to manage the risks that those influences health in which the individual has little immediate (macro environment) personal control, is one of the tasks of the current psychology, relative to a present and a future.

11. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
Consider that a catastrophic event starts, surprisingly, the continued existence and makes a fracture to the person who usually avoids having to consider his own death.

12. PSYCHOLOGY AND DISASTER
It is therefore necessary to investigate how the human population reacts to such events, in order to combine efforts to design prevention programs and ever more effective approaches.

13. RISK PERCEPTION OF NATURAL PHENOMENA: an example
According to a study published by Olcina et al. (2014), the environmental issues of greatest concern to a survey population of the SouthEast Spanish, are:

14. RISK PERCEPTION OF NATURAL PHENOMENA: an example
desertification (60%),
forest fires (59%),
drought (55%),
floods (55%),
extreme temperatures (40 %),
earthquakes (38%),
erosion (30%),
strong winds (21%),
hurricanes (9%),
tsunamis (7%),
other (2%).

15. RISK PERCEPTION OF NATURAL PHENOMENA: an example
On the other hand, the perceived threat by these natural phenomena is led by:
flooding (64%),
drought (61%),
forest fires (43%) and
desertification (43%).
The 58% perceive the evolution of the impact caused by these natural phenomena worsen.

16. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
One of the reasons that an individual, a community and a society doesn´t act preventively against the probability of a risk is due to the perception people have about the likelihood of that risk and the proximity of their consequences.

17. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
It can also happen that, while having a full awareness and perception of the probability of the risk, both individual and community and society doesn´t have the necessary resources to prevent or minimize it.
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18. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
A perception and resource availability must be added a factor, the will.
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19. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
The same risk can have different interpretations and meanings and affect health, the environment, property, future generations, etc.
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20. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
From this psychosocial approach to risk, when to assess, interpret and judge a risk we have to take into account a number of quantitative (ie. index of probability and amount of losses) and qualitative factors (ie. involuntary nature of exposure, lack of personal control, uncertainty about the likelihood or consequences of exposure, lack of credibility and trust in the institutions that manage).
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21. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
Also, the perception and the meaning that people can be attributed to the risk will be influenced by different types of beliefs, values ​​and social contexts.
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22. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
On many occasions, low priority is given to some of the dangers related to the environment, which leads many companies to live on a stage of life "latent silent emergencies" which sometimes manifest themselves in varying degrees of threat, occurrence and intensity, reaching in some cases, to acquire the status of disaster, catastrophe or calamity.
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23. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
Human behavior in disasters, in diachronic sense of the incident, passes through three stages: before, during and after. Thus, the perception of risk has to be placed in the temporary time "before".
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24. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR
We may be at an apparent dissociation between social risk perception and human behavior to the manifestation of disasters.
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25. thank you very much for your attention!!