Risky Behaviors in Yellowstone National Park: The Potential Role of Decision-Making and Justice on Visitors’ Behavior

Abstract

The National Park Service is entrusted with the difficult task of providing visitor access to popular public lands while ensuring visitor safety. Despite park managers' best efforts to keep the public safe, visitors often ignore educational messages and well-publicized regulations and engage in behaviors that are inherently risky. As a result, visitors to National Parks are injured and killed every year. A theoretical application of the concepts and findings from the fields of decision-making (i.e., theory of reasoned action) and social justice (i.e., relative deprivation, procedural justice) are used to account for why visitors to Yellowstone National Park, one of the most famous parks in the federal system, often engage in behaviors (e.g., approaching wildlife, coming in contact with thermal features) that put their lives at risk. Implications for managers of Yellowstone National Park and other protected natural areas are discussed.

Keywords:

• human–wildlife interaction
• risk behavior
• national park
• approaching wildlife

Acknowledgments

I thank Daniel J. Weigel and Paul Devereux for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.