| The frequently occurring city smog in China since 2013 has become a hot topic and raised extensive discussion in the public health domain.The extensive city smog was caused by irrational anthropogenic socioeconomic activity,and is also warnings to human beings.When faced with city smog,people cannot help but ask who should be responsible for smog pollution?As a common person,how should we do to change the status quo of the current "smog siege"?Individuals' protective actions in response to city smog are aim to reduce or eliminate risk and harm from city smog.In city smog situation,citizens' protective behavior can also be classified into two categories according to Pro-Environmental Behavior(PEB),which is widely discussed in environmental research.PEB can be probably best viewed as a mixture of two types of protective actions:self-protective actions and environmental friendly actions.During the smog episode,citizens can take actions to reduce exposure to city smog(e.g.,wear masks,stay home during smog,use air filters and maintain clean sanitation),and they can also alter their own lifestyle in order to reduce smog emission(e.g.,reduce car use and save resources).The former can be considered as self-protective actions and the latter can be seemed as environmental friendly actions.A large deal of researches and theories has proved that people behavior reaction is a process of information processing.Individuals receive information and form their perception,and then perception will determine their behavior.This study aimed to explore the internal mechanism of individuals' protective behaviors from three aspects:risk information,attribution of responsibility and attribute of protective behaviors.In this study,methods of mathematical modeling,empirical research and theoretical analysis were used.The main work of research is as follows:(1)We analysis the influence of city smog information receive pattern on individuals" perception and behavior intention.In this chapter we construct an individuals' perception growth model on the basis of the Limited Memory Theory.Using the Mullainathan theory,individuals' perception of city smog can be affected by recency rate and association rate.Simulations results of our model show that when received information during every city smog event remains unchanged,individuals'perception and behavior intention will initially increase monotonically and then stay the same.The upper limit of individual perception is decided recency rate and association rate.When received information increase or decrease monotonically,individuals' perception and behavior intention will remain largely the same,but the profile exist hysteresis.(2)We analysis the influence of citizens' attribution of responsibility on their protective behavior intention.On the basis of Attribution Theory and Protective Action Decision Model,we construct a theoretical model.In this model,we explore the influence of information source reliance,risk perception,attribution of responsibility on behavior response.We propose five research questions,and assume that citizens' risk perception can be decided by their information source reliance,their risk perception will stimulate their attribution,and then risk perception and attribution will decide their behavior.In 2014,a questionnaire survey was conducted in Hefei,the capital of Anhui Province which recently experienced severe smog events.The data from 420 respondents generally supported our model and answered these research questions.The results revealed source reliance and risk perception have a stronger influence on people's response behavior,while casual attribution's influence is relatively weak.People with higher levels of risk perception were inclined to attribute the smog outcomes to the government,industrial enterprise and individuals.In addition,people were less likely to blame members of their own party than those of other parties under the smog context.Source reliance played an important role in our analysis,and it had significant effect on risk perception and attribution of responsibility.Student sample may have lower risk perception and intention of adopting protective behaviors than community sample.(3)We analysis the influence of attributes of protective behavior on their protective behavior intention.We build a theoretical model by integrating PMT theory and PADM model together.This model mainly focus on the influence of hazard-related attribute,resource-related attribute,risk perception and past behavior on future behavior intention.We proposed five hypotheses to explore the relationships between each variable.We assume that citizens' demographic characteristic will affect their perception of risk and attributes of protective behaviors,then risk perception and protective behavior attributes as well as past behavior will subsequently affect their behavior intention.We also use questionnaire investigation to test our hypotheses.The results revealed that although risk perception influenced self-protective behaviors,it was not the most influential factor encouraging people to address city smog.By contrast,the hazard-related attributes of protective behaviors were the strongest predictor of the willingness of people to engage with behavioral response.Resource-related attribute have an unexpected positive effect on behavior intention.Demographic variables could affect the risk perception and past behavior has a strong and significant effect on intention of the behavior response of people.The innovation points of the research are as below:First,from the perspective of individual memory,our research explores the influence of individual information receive pattern on their perception and behavior intention,this is rare in the field of risk management.Second,this study combines attribution theory with PADM for the first time,which can enrich the research about attribution theory and PADM.In our study,we integrate attribution of responsibility variable into PADM model,and consider it as an important variable between information processing and behavior intention.By using attribution of responsibility,we can figure out how public attribute the city smog event and well explain how their attribution influences their behavior.Third,we integrate the sociological term "Pro-environmental behavior" which is widely accepted and discussed in the field of environment into the city smog context under the background of individual behavior study.Classify individuals' protective behaviors according to "Pro-environmental behavior" can make our conclusion more worthwhile,and it has great significance of practices on controlling city smog.Fourth,we focus on the influence of protective behavior attribute on behavior response by referencing and integrating PMT theory and PADM,and this is the first time that protective behavior attributes are applied in domestic risk management area.This article makes several contributions that build on the existing literature risk management.Our results can help managers to deeply and discriminately understand the psychological and behavioral response of citizens,so they can deliver effective interventions to help the public adopt risk treatment choices.Emergency managers can also guide citizens to reflect on themselves by public education programs. |
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