1. Introduction
Building city resilience has been a concern of governments in order to increase the capacity of spatial health systems through risk communication to reduce the negative impacts of shock on public health [
1]. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 outlines the strong relationship between health and disasters with the high frequency of unpredictable natural hazards in recent years [
2,
3]. The achievement of enhancing city resilience through disaster risk reduction is seen as an effective method for decreasing the possible damages [
4] to public health and integrating the spatial health systems in order to reduce the pressure when disasters occur. Overall, many studies have been devoted to this topic through various views, such as developing new technical methods to predict the possibility of hazard occurrence or providing a new framework to measure different types of vulnerability [
5,
6,
7], for advancing the concepts of risk by a new paradigm shift or methodology breakthrough [
8,
9,
10]. In recent years, substantial attention in public action towards environmental mitigation policies, resulting from the serious threat to public health, has been observed by scholars. From the perspective of public health, the public realizing how to respond to natural hazards is important in order to build city resilience [
1,
4,
11,
12] and achieve successful policy implementation. Residential Seismic Strengthening seems to be an effective mitigation policy worldwide for adoption to reduce the disaster losses by building collapse [
13]. The importance of seismic retrofitting could be conducted by past research [
13,
14].
From the perspective of the subjectively expected utility model in Financial Decision Theory, people might be willing to support public policies for reducing the threat if decision-makers adhere to axioms of rationality. In other words, people could regard adoption behavior as an investment target and be willing to support it with considerations towards the cost and benefit. Some famous theoretical models such as the Health Belief Model (HBM) or Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) are grounded on a perspective of consequentialism for seeking the greatest effectiveness. In the process of rational consideration, the assumption is based on the complete information provided to make individual decisions. However, in general, the threat of environmental events could not be predicted completely. Recent natural hazards, such as earthquakes or hurricanes around the world, are consistent with the unpredicted threats from natural events. The uncertainty information may lead to susceptibility to the threat. As a result, people could rely on prior experience or life experience by making decisions through different considerations rather than a rational consideration process [
15,
16].
With the breakthrough of technological measurements, psychologists have confirmed a different type of consideration to be able to answer this problem of how to explain a risk decision-making process. Evans (2003) [
17] combines relative research results and presents Dual Processing Theory (DPT) to describe two kinds of consideration systems that could exist at the same time. Furthermore, Slovic et al. (2004) [
18] describes two separate active systems when facing risky decision making. One is to realize the risk by logistic and rational analyses, and the other is to realize the risk by intuitive feeling and quick-thinking. In these two modes, the influence of the affective is shown by serial relative theories through psychological experiments within the process of decision making. In past research, affective is a measurement of variables (rather than a variable) to discuss the relationship with seismic mitigation adoption behavior. Most past studies apply affective to measure the risk perception of seismic hazards instead of an independent variable [
19,
20,
21,
22,
23]. Seldom results are found in discussing the structural relationships between affective and adoption behavior. The past rational behavior-based theories such as Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) or PMT have also had restrictions applied to them when explaining risk decision-making.
The successful implementation of environmental mitigation policy relies on strong public support. Research has been conducted to confirm the factors affecting public intention to adopt seismic mitigation policies by quantitative analysis, such as correlation analysis [
24,
25], multiple regression [
26], and logistic regression [
22]. Additionally, parts of research, through interview-based methods, reveal the decision-making framework for discussing the relationship between each affecting factor [
27,
28,
29]. Past research has shown the importance of seismic risk management in environmental planning [
30] and it provides the foundations for a deeper discussion in determining the structural relationships of each decisive factor.
The aim of this study is to construct a new model, named Mitigation Policy Acceptance Model (MPAM), for analyzing the behavioral intention of mitigation policy acceptance. The theoretical framework of MPAM is based on the Dual Processing Theory. The variable affective is the critical driving factor for connecting the pathways and variables such as risk perception, trust and responsibility from past individual decision-making theories and literature are also selected in this model. The structural equation modeling (SEM) is employed as the methodology for (1) testing the availability of MPAM, (2) realizing the thinking process of decision making under risk, and (3) analyzing the structural relationship of each selected variable. The residential seismic strengthening strategy adopted in Yongkang District of Taiwan is conducted as the case study of seismic mitigation policy through questionnaire surveys. This article includes five parts:
Section 1 is the Introduction.
Section 2 introduces the case study, MPAM framework, and research hypothesis.
Section 3 explains the results of MPAM and
Section 4 discusses these results. The final section makes some conclusions.
3. Results
The results of the model fit test are shown in
Table 4. Five common statistic tests of SEM are applied in this study, including χ
2, χ
2/DF, GFI, AGFI and RMSEA. All the statistic tests, besides the
p-value, passed, and it seems to show that the framework of this model has a good fit. In general, the value of χ
2 may change obviously when the sample number is large. The value of RMSEA is lower than 0.05, and shows the great fitness of MPAM. In other words, the structural framework of MPAM is conducted by the results of the statistic tests.
Table 5 shows the results of the path analysis by SEM. The causal paths in the framework of MPAM have been explained in
Table 1. The effects of affective on risk perception, trust, and responsibility have the statistical significant. All the impacts of all the factors on intention do not pass the statistical test; however, these results do not mean that there would have been no relationships between each variable and intention if the test of model fit had passed. There are two possible reasons to explain this result. The first is that a nonsignificant relationship could change in responders from other case study areas. The second is that the relationship could be present in specific groups of responders. The full results of the hypotheses are shown in
Table 6. The H1, H2, H3, H4, H6, and H7 are confirmed according to the test of model fit. The H5 hypothesis does not shown the necessity when determining the best model framework in the principle of the model selecting process.
In the effect analysis of SEM (
Table 7), the factor of affective has deep effects on each variable according to the result of MPAM. The highest effect on risk perception shows a close relationship, and a negative influence on responsibility is shown in this model. A direct effect of affective, trust, and responsibility on intention is shown in this model.
According to the results of SEM, the MPAM based on the Dual Processing Theory concludes some findings. Firstly, two different thinking modes truly exist when facing a risk decision-making process. In the case of residential seismic strengthening strategies, people would analyze the whole situation and conditions when they need to spend lots of time and money. On the other hand, people may also determine the decision by the affect heuristic mode when facing a decision between risk and uncertainty. This confirms that a rational-behavior-based theory is not enough to explain the whole public decision-making process. Secondly, the selected variables of trust and responsibility have an impact on behavioral intention. These results confirm the importance of these two variables in the past literature, of whether people are willing to accept public policies with uncertainty or not. Thirdly, the variable of affective has direct and indirect effects on behavioral intention, revealing the fact that the importance of this core variable has a significant impact on both rational and automatic thinking modes.
4. Discussion
This study attempted to present a new model to realize the intention behavior when people faced risky decision-making. According to past psychological research, affective has been confirmed to have an influence on intention behavior [
19,
31,
36]. To classify the influence of affective in the decision-making process, the model hypothesis based on past psychological theories and seismic preparedness behavior research focused on the influence of affective.
According to the results of SEM, some discussion about the relationships may be shown in the following context. From the results, Hypothesis 2 has a negative effect on the factor of responsibility. A different result which is inconsistent with the preview hypothesis is shown in this study [
41,
43]. According to past research, the public attitude of the responsibility for adopting hazard mitigation policies might be based on the characteristic of natural hazards if natural hazards are so threatening that people could not handle the possible damages when earthquakes happened. In other words, heavy negative affective could let people change their way of thinking to do something on their own. In addition, the positive effect of affective on intention is shown in this study, a different result from past research. Positive and negative effects are all shown in the past research. Rüstemli and Karanci (1999) [
41] and Heller et al. (2005) [
43] confirm the positive result and Basolo et al. (2009) [
27] shows a negative result. The reason for explaining the inverse outcomes is fatalism [
42]. The cultural difference between natural hazards could have a critical impact on behavior [
57]. As a result, fatalism explains why people could do nothing instead of adopting seismic mitigation policies. Finally, Hypothesis 5 does not pass the statistical test of the model fit. This result could be explained through the effect of responsibility on behavioral intention. When considering seismic mitigation as responsible for governments, people may not spend extra money to reduce the damage from hazards before they happen. As a result, risk perception does not have a significant impact on the responsibility.
MAPM confirms two thinking process exist when people make decisions on environmental mitigation policies with uncertain information. People may have an intuitive feeling or rational thinking that affects their behavioral intention. Also, the pass of model fitness shows the reliability and availability of variable selections and causal structure in this model framework. In the past literature, many researchers have devoted themselves to conducting the effects of policy incentives or personal social characteristics on mitigation policy acceptances for enhancing the effectiveness of implementing policies. In fact, people may support public policies through quick-thinking rather than logistic and rational thinking process. The results are shown for the direct and indirect impacts of affective on the behavioral intention in the study area. In this case, governments should think how to release public anxiety and worries of uncertainty through effective risk communication for achieving a successful implementation and adaption. In sum, the framework of MAPM provides a different way to analyze public willingness of environmental mitigation policies, and it is helpful for governments to develop risk communication strategies.
5. Conclusions
The study on exploring the process of whether people are determined to adopt mitigation policies has been a concern of governments with the high frequency of environmental hazards occurring in recent years. The re-emphasis is on mitigation, and preparedness in modern disaster risk-management arouses more importance in the characteristics of the dramatic consequences brought on by extremely hazardous events. In this study, MPAM-based Dual Processing Theory is proposed to reveal the structural interaction between the selected factors and mitigation policy acceptance to explain the thinking process of the public from automatic or rational systems as a response to seismic hazards. A case study area of Yongkang City in Taiwan is conducted to analyze the decision making process of residential seismic strengthening policy. The great model fitness (RMSEA < 0.05) is shown by the statistical tests, and the effect of affective is emphasized in the model of this article for explaining the structural decision process and has been confirmed by the results in this paper. The affective has a direct impact (0.221) and an indirect effect (0.005) on the intention.
On the whole, MPAM shows the availability to analyze the decision-making process and confirms that people may support public policy through quick-thinking process rather than logistic consideration when facing uncertainty. The question why the past rational-based model could not completely explain the behavior of supporting public policies could be answered, even if it is helpful for people to reduce the losses and decrease the reduce the risk potential to life. In this study, a preliminary result of MPAM is shown for analyzing the individual decision-making process of residential seismic strengthening policy. The future work could apply MPAM in comparison with an existing theoretical model through different study areas or mitigation policies for realizing the potentiality and restriction of the new model. The results in the paper could suggest to the government how to make risk communication strategies for residents. It is believed that it could be helpful for enhancing health resilience and reducing the pressure of spatial health systems through reducing negative impacts of future environmental hazards.