A Validation of Textual Expression About Disaster Information to Induce Evacuation

An immediate evacuation is essential for safety when a big earthquake and/or a tsunami occurs. For example, the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 killed over 10 thousand people, and over 90% of them drowned due to the tsunami. Additionally, people who failed to escape from the tsunami after the earthquake occurred, suffered heavy losses due to the tsunami. If they had evacuated immediately after the earthquake hit, it would have been possible to reduce the losses. In this study, we compare textual expression about disaster information available on smartphones to evaluate the effectiveness of whether this information can induce immediate evacuation. The results of our comparison show that information pertaining to damage caused by disasters and fear-arousing communication is the most effective to induce evacuation. Following the results, we conducted two experiments to evaluate the impact of the most effective sentence in the comparison. This paper shows the results of a comparison study and these experiments.