Flooding is one of the most significant natural disasters worldwide. Nevertheless, voluntary take-up of individual damage reduction measures is low. A potential explanation is that flood risk perceptions of individual homeowners are below objective estimates of flood risk, which may imply that they underestimate the flood risk and the damage that can be avoided by damage reduction measures. The aim of this paper is to assess possible flood risk misperceptions of floodplain residents in the Netherlands, and to offer insights into factors that are related with under- or overestimation of perceived flood risk. We analyzed survey data of 1848 homeowners in the Dutch river delta and examine how perceptions of flood probability and damage relate to objective risk assessments, such as safety standards of dikes, as well as heuristics, including the availability heuristic and the affect heuristic. Results show that many Dutch floodplain inhabitants significantly overestimate the probability, but underestimate the maximum expected water level of a flood. We further observe that many respondents apply the availability heuristic. Open access PDF at publisher

We conducted an experiment in a high-immersive virtual reality environment to study the effect of the presence of a virtual observer on cheating behavior. Par- ticipants were placed in a virtual room and played 30 rounds of a cheating game without a chance of their cheating being detected. We varied whether or not a vir- tual observer (an avatar) was present in the room, and, if so, whether the avatar was actively staring at the decision maker or passively seated in a corner watching his smartphone. Results display significantly less cheating with an active than with a passive avatar, but not less cheating than in a control condition without an avatar. This suggests that an active (virtual) observer can intensify reputational concerns, but that the presence of someone passive and uninterested may actually alleviate such concerns. Open access PDF at publisher