Conflicting social influence on evacuation behavior

• Applicant: Dr. Max Kinateder
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2015 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 277045983

The proposed project titled Conflicting Social influence on Evacuation aims to study why and how building occupants evacuate during fire alarms. Four sub objectives can be defined. First, study the effect of several bystanders and conflicting information on evacuation behavior. To this end, a virtual reality study will investigate, how the probability and delay of evacuation can be described as a function of relative and absolute frequencies of evacuating bystanders. The derived psychometric can be used to identify the tipping point at which participants decision to evacuate is particularly vulnerable to social influence. Second, differentiate in detail how several male and female bystanders influence male and female participants' decision to evacuate during a fire alarm. In a second virtual reality study, male and female participants will be confronted with a simulated fire alarm and several bystanders. The proportion of male/female bystanders will be systematically manipulated. Third, investigate how the presence of stressors, such as fire alarm signals, affects the way-finding performance during evacuation. Here, participants' way-finding performance through an unknown virtual building will be measured. Half of the participants will be confronted with a fire alarm sound whereas the other half will hear a neutral sound. Fourth, integrate the findings into a theoretical framework and model the empirical results in a simulation. The results from the virtual reality studies will be implemented in a computer simulation based on the Behavioral Dynamics Framework (Warren, 2006).

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor William Warren, Ph.D.