Friendships and Disasters
https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/views/analysis/how-social-networks-can-save-lives-when-disasters-strike-869348.html
What makes someone likely to evacuate during a hurricane? In a world of increasing climate change and ubiquity of natural disasters, we have a large amount of data on how people tend to move during these crises. In light of the 17 deaths caused by Hurricane Florence, I thought it would be interesting to see if there was any research related to this. In fact, there was a recent study done using Facebook geo-location data that showed that three types of social ties would influence someone to stay or leave. Two of the ties, bridging and linking ties, make someone likely to evacuate during a natural disaster. Bridging ties are considered those with connections through shared interest, work or place of worship. Linking ties connect people with people in positions of power, such as government officials. These are expected because we assume government officials will promote evacuations and other leaders from our community or acquaintances from far away will likely be concerned about the incoming storm and invite us to seek shelter with them. However, the interesting part of the study is that the stronger relationships people have with close friends and family, the less likely they are to evacuate. These bonding ties are likely to decrease evacuation because people with strong local friends are likely to downplay the potential hazards of the storm because they have a support group. This false sense of security has caused many deaths in recent hurricanes.
By examining the structure of networks, we can see some features that might make someone more likely to evacuate. An ego with a lot of close friends and family are likely to have friendship ties with each other because they live in the same region. This convinces people to stay put because they feel the need to support their community in a time of despair, but this causes a network effect of people downplaying the severity of the storm. In contrast to this, people with more local bridges in their network are more likely to evacuate. By meeting people who live far away through travel and social media, or even gaming, someone is more likely to encounter outside opinions and find places to evacuate to. By this theory, we would think that lower clustering coefficients would increase the likelihood of evacuation.
One of the implications of this study is that elderly people, who have a small and local social network, are more likely to stubbornly stay in their homes. I’ve encountered this phenomenon first hand with my own grandparents. I think that if we start encouraging elderly people to pursue online friendships or promote senior center events, then we can start to combat this problem. With the increasing presence of tablets and video connected devices, hopefully we will start to see death tolls from natural disasters significantly drop in the next decade.