Cybergeo (Sep 2015)
Les comportements humains en situation de catastrophe : de l’observation à la modélisation conceptuelle et mathématique
Abstract
Over the last thirty years, the prevention of risks and disasters has become a major issue for societies in developed countries. These concerns are linked with important financial losses, the unequal repartition of global casualties and a wide media coverage of all catastrophic events. Our societies, independently of their development level, are not well prepared to cope with natural or anthropogenic disasters and possible domino effects. In order to reduce the vulnerability of populations and territories, three levers can be used: planning policies, civil engineering and training in order to adapt their behaviors to disaster situations. This paper deals with this latter lever. Indeed, specific behaviors in these unexpected situations have been observed by researchers in Human and Social Sciences from different disciplines, such as the medicine of catastrophes, psychology, sociology, anthropology and geography. Most of the time, this research deals with the observation of human reactions during a specific event or with the analysis of specific behavior such as looting or panic. These works rarely take into account the progress of knowledge in neurosciences, which teaches us that, during a crisis, people rarely adopt a unique behavior; rather there is a sequence of behavioral responses. The first, instinctive and of short duration, gives way to reasoned reactions according to the brain areas processing the information. Thus, in this multidisciplinary research including geographers, mathematicians and computer scientists, we present the panel of human reactions that may occur during catastrophic events and we organize this knowledge around a typology. This typology is structured around two axes: the areas of the brain involved in behavioral responses and the temporal phases of the disaster. Based on this typology, we propose a mathematical model in order to understand these individual and collective responses as behavioral sequences and to study their propagation. Three types of reactions (reflex behavior, panic and controlled behavior) and their interactions have been modelled by a system of differential equations.
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