The 2021-22 AppRISE team is happy to be back on campus working together in person, and is busy working on three projects this fall semester. The first of these is a continuation of the ASU property inventory project that began in early 2020, prior to the pandemic. The team is taking inventory of campus buildings, along with their primary and secondary risk characteristics and their contents. This project is in conjunction with ASU's risk management staff and general counsel.
The second and third projects are behavioral studies of individual and business decision making under risk. One is an experiment-based look at why individuals make consumer decisions during and surrounding disaster events that might be viewed as 'weird' (e.g., the toilet paper hoarding during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, bread and milk panics just before winter weather). We hypothesize that some of these behaviors are based on 'unfiltered advice' (usually in the form of stories) passed down from parents or others who have experienced past disasters. If and when filtered, we also hypothesize that several behavioral variables come into play, thus influencing an individual's consumer decisions, right down to what to purchase at the grocery store.
The third project is a study of psychology within the business decision environment, namely how diversity of thought (or lack thereof) contributes to differences in enterprise risk management decisions and to the quality of these business decisions. We expect overall that decision groups with a wider diversity of backgrounds, demographics and even personalities make risk management decisions that have superior outcomes to those groups having less diversity.
The current 2021-22 AppRISE team includes students Ariela Allen, Hannah Bagley, Madison Browne, Omar Gonzalez and Sasha Sterling as well as Professor Lori Medders. If you are interested in our projects, let us know! Write to Professor Medders at meddersla@appstate.edu.