The experiments showed that collisions and pushing increased quickly under stress. Further stress-inducing elements were poor lighting, red blinking lights, and fires at the blocked exits. At the end of the session, the points won were converted into monetary bonuses. In addition, the researchers increased the stress level by putting participants under time pressure and monetary pressure: Participants had to escape the building within 50 seconds to avoid a substantial loss of points. Participants knew that some group members were aware of the correct exit, but they did not know who those people were. Although most of the group did not know which was the correct exit, some participants were directed to it by an arrow at the top of their computer screen. ![]() To find out how the participants reacted in an emergency situation, the researchers simulated an evacuation from a complex building with four exits, only one of which was usable. ![]() “Our experiments have shown that virtual environments can help us investigate human behaviour in emergency situations – something that isn’t possible in the real world for ethical and safety reasons,” says Mehdi Moussaïd, researcher in the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Previous studies have shown that Europeans tend to intuitively walk on the right-hand side. The avoidance behaviours seen in the virtual environment were consistent with those observed in a real-life experiment: 95% of participants chose to pass each other on the right-hand side. For example, participants were asked to move their avatar through a narrow corridor without bumping into any of the other avatars. The researchers were able to show that participants‘ behaviour in the virtual environment was largely consistent with real-world behaviours. The researchers studied the participants‘ behaviours in several experiments, setting them various tasks under high-stress conditions. ![]() Each participant simultaneously navigated an avatar through virtual space on a computer screen. Why are emergency situations such as evacuations of buildings so often characterized by mass herding and overcrowding? And which areas of a building are particularly dangerous in emergency evacuations? Because these questions are difficult to study in the real world, the international research team exposed 36 participants to an emergency in a three-dimensional virtual environment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |