Natural Hazards and Job Choice: Conclusions

Game participants spanned multiple age groups (from Gen Z to Baby Boomers) in roughly similar proportions across the geoscience and non-geoscience cohorts. The geoscientist group was highly educated with a majority holding graduate degrees, significantly more than in the non-geoscientist group. Overall, participants represented a well-educated sample of professionals at various career stages with just over half being geoscientists.

Hazard Exposure and Concern at Current Locations

About three-quarters of participants lived in areas with low to moderate overall natural hazard risk exposure. Only roughly one-fifth were in high or very high-risk areas for natural hazards, and this share was only slightly higher for geoscientists than for others, a difference that was not statistically significant. In terms of specific hazards, severe weather (storms, severe thunderstorms, etc.) was the most common risk, with about three-quarters of respondents living in counties rated high to very high risk for severe weather. Also, about two-thirds of respondents lived in areas with moderate risk of slide hazards (i.e., landslides, mudslides, etc.). Flood risk was another prevalent hazard: 42% lived in moderate flood risk areas and roughly 27% in high flood risk areas. On the other hand, fewer people were exposed to other natural hazards such as earthquakes or wildfires in their current residence. For example, earthquake exposure skewed low – 43% were in low-risk earthquake zones and only about 20% in high-risk zones. Wildfire risk was very low for about half of the participants, and only around 15–19% (somewhat more geoscientists than non-geoscientists) lived in high wildfire risk areas. Almost no one lived in a place with any appreciable volcanic risk (94% had zero volcanic hazard).

Furthermore, most participants reported experiencing no impacts from volcanic hazards, slides, earthquakes, and wildfires, while just under half of participants reported the same for floods, and just under a third reported the same for severe weather impacts. While not statistically significant, slightly more geoscientists than non-geoscientists reported impacts from wildfires, floods, slides, and volcanoes than non-geoscientists.

Despite these varied hazard exposures, most people were not concerned about natural hazards where they lived. Concern was negligible for most individuals for volcanoes, earthquakes and slide hazards. Even wildfires were not a concern for the slight majority of respondents. However, hazards that occur more widely and more frequently tended to elicit more concern. Roughly half of participants were at least slightly or somewhat concerned about flooding (45–52%) and severe weather (47–50%) at their current location. Severe weather was the hazard that caused the most concern overall – about one-quarter of non-geoscientists and nearly one-third of geoscientists reported being “very” or “extremely” concerned about severe weather where they lived. While these differences by cohort were not statistically significant, it’s noteworthy that geoscientists were slightly more likely to express more concern about floods, severe weather, wildfires, and slide hazards than non-geoscientists.

It’s worth noting that there was a strong relationship between experience and concern: those who had personally experienced severe impacts from hazards tended to be more concerned about hazards in general. Correlations between experience and concern were moderate to strong across all hazards for both cohorts, with non-geoscientists having higher correlations for most hazards than geoscientists. The highest alignment between concern and hazard experience related to severe weather, floods, and wildfires.

However, natural hazard risk factored very little into people’s choice of where to live. When asked what was important to them in choosing their current place of residence, 58% of geoscientists and 48% of non-geoscientists said that hazard risk did not figure into their decision. Crime risk was similarly dismissed by many – 52% of geoscientists and 40% of non-geoscientists said crime levels were not a factor in choosing where they lived. Instead, factors most often rated as highly important in choosing where to live were things like general location or region, proximity to family/friends, community resources such as amenities and services, income and cost considerations, and locations with favorable weather. By contrast, less than a fifth of participants said hazard risk was highly important in their choice of residence.

When asked what influenced their choice of current occupation, the vast majority noted that the nature of the job’s characteristics (the role, responsibilities, etc.) were very important in choosing their occupation. Location was the next important factor, followed by income.

Deciding on a Job: Balancing Salary, Location, and Risk

By and large, geoscientists and non-geoscientists behaved similarly when evaluating job offers and making final job choices. Participant’s behavior revealed clear preferences and trade-offs with the following attributes having the strongest influence on which job people decided upon.

Salary was the strongest driver of job choice. Higher-paying jobs were far more likely to be chosen than lower-paying ones, all else being equal.
Crime rate in the city where the job was located was a significant deterrent of job choice. Jobs in areas with higher crime risk were substantially less likely to be selected. This suggests participants were quite sensitive to personal safety and would shy away from a job in a dangerous city, even if other aspects of the job were good. This implies that crime risk may translate into a greater weight on personal security, whereas natural hazards may be more abstract or rare, and thus are not considered as important.
Hazard risk played a part in job consideration, but only in a significant way when salaries were high. Otherwise, hazard risk had a weaker negative effect on job choice overall that was only marginally significant. Individuals showed some aversion to high-risk zones when choosing a job, but it was not as strong of a deterrent as crime. When analyzed separately, hazard risk aversion was marginally significant for geoscientists and not for non-geoscientists. This suggests that those with a geoscience background may have been a bit more likely to decline jobs in high-hazard areas, consistent with the idea that they would recognize and respond to these risks. However, both groups still ranked hazard risk below other factors in their reasons for choosing their final job, so this signal is not consistent between attitudes and actions.

The influence of a high salary was dampened if the job was in a high-hazard location. The data suggests that high hazard risk demanded a higher salary to make the accepting the job worth it. While no single threshold was pinpointed beyond which participants universally rejected jobs, the fact that hazard risk significantly weakened the attractiveness of salary shows that beyond a certain level of danger, many participants hesitated unless the reward was great.

In terms of being open to relocation, a person’s stated willingness (or unwillingness) to relocate didn’t influence what they actually did in the game. Whether participants were willing to move or not had no significant effect on the likelihood of them choosing a job outside their home region. In the analysis, neither the “willingness to move” variable itself nor its interaction with the distance of the move showed a meaningful impact on final choices. Some of those who were decided on staying ended up selecting job offers that required relocating if the offers were attractive enough. In contrast, the same occurred for those who decided on moving out of their home region - some chose jobs in their home reason given a good enough offer. Additionally, those who were open to relocating were not markedly more responsive to salary than “stayers” or “movers” once other factors were accounted for. In short, the analyses illustrate that a compelling enough job offer can override one’s intent to move or stay in a location.

Influence of Natural Hazard Concern on Decision-Making

A key focus of this study was to see whether people’s attitudes about natural hazards influenced their job choice behavior. Did those concerned about natural disasters avoid risky locations? Did those who were indifferent to hazard risk choose jobs in high-risk areas? The results revealed a gap between attitudes and actions, especially regarding natural hazards.

After making their final job choice in the game, participants were asked about the factors that were important in their decision. Very few participants listed hazard risk as a top reason for their choice – which is not surprising given that hazard risk was low many participant’s priority lists for choosing where they current lived. However, people who cited hazard risk as important in their determination of their final job tended to be those who also considered hazard risk when choosing where they currently lived. Likewise, participants who were more concerned about hazards where they currently lived were more inclined to report that hazard risk influenced their final job choice though this effect was modest. In short, people who noted concern and/or importance of natural hazards acknowledged that sentiment when explaining their job decision.

However, when we looked at what jobs people chose, the connection between hazard attitudes and actions was not very strong. Participants who said hazard risk was important didn’t consistently choose safer jobs than those who didn’t consider hazard risk as important. In contrast, participants who declared that crime risk was an important factor in job choice largely did pick jobs in lower-crime areas, and those who said income was important followed through by choosing higher-salary jobs. Statistically, there was almost no difference in the average hazard risk of the chosen job between people who emphasized hazard avoidance and those who didn’t. Many participants who ranked hazard risk as important in their job choice decision still accepted jobs in areas with considerable hazard risk.

We also examined the hazard risk levels of final job choices for those who said hazard risk influenced their choices versus those who didn’t across various hazard types. The only hazard for which there was a difference between these groups was earthquake risk: people who claimed earthquake hazard risk was a factor tended to avoid the highest earthquake risk areas somewhat more than others. There was also a slight tendency to avoid wildfire-prone areas among the hazard-concerned group, but it was only a marginal signal. For other hazards like floods, severe weather, or slides, there was no significant difference between groups. Those who said they cared about hazards ended up taking jobs in flood or storm-prone regions just as often as everyone else. Especially for these hazards, this may reflect the ubiquity of severe weather and flood hazards across the U.S. which may be a trade-off that individuals are willing to make for attractive job offers.

We also assessed if prior experience with hazard impacts negatively influenced job choice in high-risk locations. For almost all hazards, prior experience with natural hazard impacts didn’t lead to avoidance of job acceptance, with the exception of wildfire. Interestingly, people who had experienced severe wildfire impacts were more likely to take jobs in high wildfire-risk areas. This might indicate a form of normalization to this particular hazard, whether that be through preparedness, and/or a level of financial protection such as though insurance. For hazards such as earthquakes, floods, and storms, there was no significant difference in behavior between those who had experienced intense impacts and those who hadn’t.

We also looked at whether people’s levels of concern about specific hazards corresponded to the risk level of the job they chose. Interestingly, for some hazards, higher concern actually correlated with choosing jobs in higher-risk locations. Notably, participants who expressed greater concern about earthquakes or wildfires tended to choose jobs in places with higher earthquake or wildfire risk on average. For other hazard types (floods, severe weather, slides), concern didn’t reliably track to hazard avoidance or indifferent attitudes. Individuals concerned about hazard risk still accepted jobs in risky areas.

These results highlight a gap in attitudes and actions when it comes to natural hazard risk. Concern about hazards, experience with hazards, and even consideration of hazards in life choices still take second place to factors like career, salary, and location preferences when making life choices like relocation for a job. This shuffling of factors could be interpreted as a form of risk tolerance in that hazards may be seen as unavoidable or just part of the background risk of life, whereas things like income and community are more tangible and controllable priorities. Alternatively, a lack of financial well-being may be considered the largest risk that is consistently acted upon along with crime risk. These may be considered more directly and personally impactful, whereas hazard risk may be more of a distant threat to personal security, and therefore less important when making life choices.

Personal Values, Trade-offs, and Broader Patterns

Beyond hazards alone, this game revealed several broader patterns in how people make relocation decisions. One finding is that participants tended to remain consistent in their personal values and priorities throughout different decisions. The study compared the reasons people gave for choosing their current home and current job with the reasons they gave for their final job choice in the game. Factors of consideration included hazard risk, crime risk, income, favorable climate/weather, distance from social networks, and community amenities. Across these factors there was a meaningful alignment: individuals who prioritized a factor in their current life situation tended to note its importance again in their job selection. For some factors, such as income, crime, and hazards, we were able to see a follow-through on action as it related to the importance of that factor in decision making. For example, someone who chose to live in a location because of the low crime rate almost always also cited crime/safety as important in their final job choice – and indeed chose a low-crime job location. The same was true for those who prioritized income - they cited it as important in their final job choice and chose high salary jobs. However, for hazard risk, as previously noted, there was a disconnect between prioritization and action.

As for willingness to relocate, several factors were influential. Older participants were less willing to move far for a job than younger participants. This is consistent with general trends that as people age, they become more settled and less eager to uproot their lives. Additionally, participants who had chosen their current location for its nice climate were reluctant to leave it – those who said favorable weather was important to them were significantly less willing to move to a different region. Conversely, those who cited income as a major factor in where they lived were more willing to move for a new job.

Finally, the results suggest that geoscientists did not have a higher risk tolerance for natural hazards than non-geoscientists. Both cohorts followed the same overall priorities of salary over risk. If anything, geoscientists showed a lower tolerance for hazard risk in their choices, meaning they were slightly more likely to avoid a risky area. However, this difference was minor. Geoscientists did not disproportionately choose high-hazard jobs, nor did they differ in moving patterns. Having scientific knowledge about hazards didn’t lead to significant differences in job choice, suggesting that geoscientists were not very different from non-geoscientists when balancing job benefits and risks.

How People Balance Opportunity and Risk

This game offered key insights into the decision-making process of job seekers facing different risk scenarios. Participants, whether geoscientists or not, approached their decision making pragmatically, weighing tangible benefits like salary, location, and career opportunities against risks such as crime and natural hazards, with economic factors tending to be weighted most unless the risk was extremely high. Most people did not make their choice based primarily on concern for natural hazards. They showed a willingness to relocate for a good opportunity regardless of relocation distance if the job was attractive. Natural hazard risk played a relatively minor role in their final decisions – it was more of a tiebreaker or a secondary consideration, except in extreme cases. For example, an excellent job in a city with occasional earthquakes or hurricanes was usually still chosen; but if two jobs were similar, a person might use the hazard factor as a deciding factor to avoid the riskier locale.

Participants clearly drew the line more firmly with human-related risks like crime – a high-crime area was often a deal-breaker from the start, whereas a high-hazard area was often tolerated if it came with other perks, especially economic incentives. This suggests that people perceive and evaluate these risks differently: crime feels personal and immediate, while natural hazards, however dangerous, are often seen as intermittent or something one can prepare for or insure against.

Another key insight is the consistency of personal values. People who valued family, community, or climate in their lives tried to honor those values even when eyeing a new job. Likewise, those motivated by money consistently chased higher-paying options. This consistency means that the way someone approaches one life decision (like where to live now) is a good predictor of how they’ll approach another (like a future job move). For organizations or policymakers, this implies that interventions to encourage relocating away from high-risk areas may need to tap into those same core values – for instance, emphasizing community or financial incentives – because just highlighting hazard risk might not be enough to change behavior.

Perhaps most striking is the attitude-behavior gap regarding natural hazards: even when people know a lot about hazards (as many geoscientists do) or have experienced disasters and express concern, they often still choose to live and work in harm’s way if the job or lifestyle benefits are compelling. It appears that for many, the trade-off is conscious – they acknowledge the risk but decide the reward is worth it. There may also be an element of fatalism or trust in mitigation or other societal supports. This doesn’t mean people ignore hazards entirely – but the threshold to actually alter one’s decision because of hazard risk is relatively high.

In summary, when individuals face a choice of relocating for work, they prioritize career and personal benefits, carefully consider crime and cost-of-living, and generally hope to have both a good job and a safe location – but if they can’t have both, they’ll often take the higher paying job and accept the natural hazard risk. Geoscientist or not, most people in this study acted with a similar cost–benefit mindset. They stayed true to their long-term priorities (be it family, income, or lifestyle) and negotiated the trade-offs as best as they could. These findings underscore the challenge in getting individuals to move out of disaster-prone areas purely for safety’s sake – unless the economic or social incentives align, hazard risk alone seldom dictated the outcome. Ultimately, the patterns suggest that personal outcomes (like financial stability and personal safety) weigh more heavily in decision-making than the abstract possibility of a natural disaster, which is a valuable insight for urban planners, employers, and policymakers interested in community resilience and workforce distribution.