How Operational Updates Shape Emotional and Behavioral Responses to Disasters

Abstract

Effective communication during disasters is critical to saving lives, but relief organizations’ operational updates can inadvertently heighten fear and reduce public compliance with safety instructions. Despite relief organizations’ widespread use of social media, little is known about how their operational updates affect public emotions and behaviors. Using a multi-method approach that combines empirical analysis of wildfire response data and online experiments, we investigate how operational updates influence fear and behavioral intentions. Our findings reveal that disclosing the number of resources deployed increases fear, which, in turn, reduces compliance with safety warnings. However, simple adjustments–such as including resource quality details–significantly reduce fear and improve public intention to heed warnings. These results provide actionable, low-cost strategies for relief organizations to enhance public trust and engagement during disaster responses. We advance the disaster management literature by highlighting the behavioral impacts of public emotions and contribute to operational transparency research by identifying effective communication strategies under uncertain conditions.

Keywords: disaster response, operational transparency, operational updates, social media, information management