The role of cognitive biases in reactions to bushfires

Maël Arnaud (1) , Carole Adam (2) , Julie Dugdale (1)

1 MAGMA - Modélisation d’agents autonomes en univers multi-agents
2 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble

Human behaviour is influenced by many psychological factors such as emotions, whose role is already widely recog-nised. Another important factor, and all the more so during disasters where time pressure and stress constrain reasoning, are cognitive biases. In this paper, we present a short overview of the literature on cognitive biases and show how some of these biases are relevant in a particular disaster, the 2009 bushfires in the SouthEast of Australia. We provide a preliminary formalisation of these cognitive biases in BDI (beliefs, desires, intentions) agents, with the goal of integrating such agents into agent-based models to get more realistic behaviour. We argue that taking such "irrational" behaviours into account in simulation is crucial in order to produce valid results that can be used by emergency managers to better understand the behaviour of the population in future bushfires.

Mots clés: Multi-agent modelling; social simulation; cognitive biases; BDI paradigm; Victoria bushfires

Domaines: Sciences de l'information et de la communication; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Système multi-agents [cs.MA]; Modélisation et simulation; Informatique

Maël Arnaud, Carole Adam, Julie Dugdale. The role of cognitive biases in reactions to bushfires. ISCRAM, May 2017, Albi, France. ⟨halshs-02116079⟩