The effect of social factors and exit signage on route choices and movement time in a virtual environment during a stressful event.

Abstract

The lack of crowd safety during an evacuation is not only an engineering problem but also a psychological problem. Due to stress there is a reduction of cue utilization. People tend to follow others and ignore exit signage. This leads to a non-optimal use of evacuation routes during an evacuation, which could have detrimental effects. The amount of people using an exit influences the perceived utility of the exit route. In this study, we focused on two factors which influence people’s behavior during a stressful event. The effect of social factors and exit signage on route choices and movement time were researched. We used a virtual environment to study human route decisions during a stressful event. In the virtual environment, we presented different Y- intersections with different presented (combinations) of the cues. We used two different gradations of a social factor; one virtual person and ten virtual people. Our findings suggest that participants tended to make route choices based upon exit signage more than upon social factors. We found no difference in the effect of one virtual person and ten virtual people. We found weak support that participants become aware of exit signage the more times they see them. Our findings may be useful for future research on real human route decisions during an evacuation or for developing more realistic virtual simulations.