Hi.

I'm back to talk about the second module in the Human Behavior Series,

on What Human Behavior in Fire is NOT.

So after talking about what human behavior is, I think it's important to kinda

talk about some of the misconceptions of how people act in fires.

And to try to kinda break those down a bit, and

talk about why those really aren't the case.

And the first one is a really important one.

The Ideal Situation.

And so, there are some kinda, there's a misconception out

there that people are very, very efficient in a fire situation.

And what I mean by the ideal situation is, they get into a building,

it's a very well defined procedure, the procedure's implemented with current,

accurate information, and because of that,

the occupants respond very promptly to the instructions provided.

And once the instructions are initiated everyone gets up and moves directly

to a place of safety, and all of the routes are used very efficiently.

And I just wanna show kind of a video of that,

this kind of ideal situation myth here.

So as you can see, the fire alarm has gone off.

Everybody just gets up at the same time.

They walk very efficiently.

There's no, someone's grabbed the flag, as you can see.

And they, movement is immediate, and there are all the exits,

and everyone seems to know about all the exits.

And it's a very efficient evacuation.

And what I'd like to talk to you about is this is a very ideal situation.

This almost never happens.

And it's kind of like a spoof on what we'd like to happen.

And I think we can try to achieve this.

And the more accurate information we provide to people,

the more credible information, the more accurate it is, the more we provide

the appropriate information to people, the closer we can get to this.

And I would very much agree with that, but this is really not what we should be

planning for, or expecting in any way.

It's very likely that there will be some delays.

It's very likely that people will wonder what's going on if they here an alarm,

they will talk to one another about what's going on,

especially in a movie theater, as this might show here, or

a show, some people might actually say, well, do you know what that is?

Is that a part of the show?

Is that a part of the act?

Is it part of the movie?

Is this really going on?

And is this something that I really need to do something about?

And, especially, if you're sitting in a movie theater,

you've paid to see the movie or you've paid to see the show,

It's going to take a little bit of prompting from the building alarm message,

or even having someone come in from the management of the theater,

and actually prompt people to move.

Because we've paid for the movie, we're sitting down, we're watching it, and

in some of these situations, or, especially, in this context,

it actually is going to take us a little bit more to actually believe

that something credible is going on, and that we need to do something about it.

So although this is a nice situation, and we try very hard to get to this place,

where people evacuate immediately and promptly, this is not the norm.

And also the ideal situation where people use all the exits evenly,

again this is not the norm.

What I was talking about in the previous module is that

we very much move toward the familiar.

So the exit in which people came into this movie theater is more likely the exit

that they're gonna use to evacuate.

And so, some of the exits in the back that we almost never use to get into a theater,

as shown in this example, is probably not gonna be used very widely,

unless there are people in that movie theater directing you to use that exit.

So there are ways in which we can get people to use the exits more evenly,

but some of these things have to be put into place.

And it's not just gonna be that easy, like you sound an alarm, and

everybody just kind of moves in a very ideal situation.

Okay, the next is the panic myth.

Okay, and human behavior in fire is not dominated by panic.

And I wanna read a little bit here from my notes about how the media

helps to perpetuate the panic myth.

Okay, following the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in 1977 in the USA,

the Sun's headline was, Panic Kills 300.

The Daily Mail had pages about 200 feared dead in the Kentucky club fire,

many trapped in panic.

And panic has begun to kind of be expected from journalists in the US and

maybe abroad.

So much so that after the emergency landing of flight 1549 in the Hudson

river, and that occurred on January 15th 2009, the CNN journalist

asked a passenger, all right, and I quote, all right, so then what happens?

Do you hit the water, do people start to scream?

I know there were a lot of people, you say, praying, but

was there a sort of panic that developed?

And the interviewee answered, I don't recall panic really at all.

And so, there's kind of this myth, and I believe it's perpetuated by the media, and

also it's perpetuated by some of us who believed they have panicked,

when it actually hasn't been the case, and

it actually causes some negative consequences.

So what do I mean by panic?

And by panic I mean that behavior that is anti social and competitive.

It's reaching safety at the expense of the safety of others.

And from what we've seen in building fire events, this is a rare occurrence.

What is most likely the case is that individuals perform altruistic behavior,

and what I mean by that is, helping each other rather than competing with each

other, especially, at the expense of others safety.

What normally is the case is that people take time and try to help one another,

even if they don't know the person, at the expense of their own safety.

Now there are conditions in which panic has been seen to occur, and

I have a few of these written on the screen actually by Dennis Wenger and

also Janis and Mann wrote about this, that there are conditions,

in which, have to be in place for panic to occur.

It doesn't have to occur, but this is when panic could occur.

And these are that danger is perceived as a specific threat,

and this results in a social crisis.

Limited escape routes exist, and they're rapidly being closed off.

People believe that escape is possible, and

that competition starts to occur rather than cooperation.

And so, competition is actually necessary for escape.

And there are a lack of ties to other individuals.

And so, these are some of the conditions,

these are the conditions stated in which panic might occur,

but we just don't see it very often in building fire events.

And that's really important, because there are consequences,

in which, there are consequences of this panic myth, okay?

So I talk about a couple slides ago, where the media asks, did panic occur?

Now sometimes the media has asked, or other people, interviewers or

others, have asked, so did you see any instances of panic?

Or have asked, what happened in that building fire event?

And sometimes people will say, well I just panicked, it was terrible, I panicked.

And then when you ask them a little bit more about what they did,

they actually didn't panic at all.

They say, well, I went to get my child, and my child was crying.

And I put them over my shoulder, and I went to get my purse, and

then I left the building, and that's actually not panic at all.

They might have felt a higher level of arousal, a more physical kind of

level of arousal, but that is not what we're considering panic here,

which is a competition at the expense of other's safety.

But once you start to kind of get into this panic myth and

this kind of cyclical process of believing that panic occurred,

you can see that people report that they panic.

And then another issue is that emergency officials start to believe that

panic is a normal response in fires, okay?

We know it's not.

But if emergency officials, such as building managers or fire marshals that

have to design emergency procedures for buildings, if they start to believe that

panic is a normal response, and actually this has been the case in the past,

then what happens is that emergency information begins to be withheld.

What I've heard from in the past is, well,

I don't wanna give people information about what's going on, they'll just panic.

And that is exactly the opposite.

If we don't give people information about what's going on,

then I'm not gonna say panic can happen, but people can start to get worried.

They can start to get upset.

And they start to actually look for more information themselves.

So they start to do more information seeking.

And they start to ask people what's going on, and that takes time.

It takes precious time away from their own safety.

Whereas, if we gave them more information, right, if we told them what was going

on and gave them credible, accurate information about what was going on, and

it was consistent with everything else they were seeing and hearing,

then they are actually more likely to take appropriate, efficient,

safe responses in a fire.

Okay, and so when we go through this loop,

and we worry about panic, and we don't give people the right information,

then the problem is that human response becomes delayed and inefficient.

Okay, if we believe that people will panic, so

we don't give them the right information, so then they don't have any information or

not enough when something happens, then they're more likely to delay their

response, and, potentially, not take the actions that are safest for them.

So we have some real serious consequences if we believe that panic occurs, and

as a researcher in the field of building fires,

and even actually other disasters, we just don't see panic very often.

It's a very rare occurrence.

Okay, another myth that I'd like to talk about is role abandonment.

And this kinda comes more from the disaster realm, but

I think it's still appropriate for building fires.

And the definition here is that emergency officials abandon their post before or

during a disaster, and here we're talking about building fires.

And the thought is that they have a role conflict between their professional

duties, and their desire to take care of themselves and others, like their family.

And after studying over 100 disasters,

they didn't see role conflict as a serious problem.

Dynes and Quarantelli didn't.

And so I asked kind of the audience, how can you relate this to fires?

And we have some people in building fires that take some very serious roles.

For example,

a building manager might step into a more serious role when a fire occurs.

We also have fire wardens, and their job in some, maybe office buildings,

is to make sure that the people are accounted for, they put on their vest,

they get their clipboard, and they walk through the halls maybe, and

make sure on their way out that everyone has reached safety.

So they've got certain roles in building fires, and

the question here is whether or not they'll actually perform their roles, or

will they abandon their role when push comes to shove.

And we also have firefighters, right, who continually respond to building fires,

and perform very important life safety roles, in addition to,

putting out the fire, all right?

They have search and rescue important responsibilities.

And so, we just don't see the type of role abandonment in disasters, and

we shouldn't be expecting that in building fires, as well.

Fire wardens do take their role, if they're there that day,

they do take the role that they're assigned in their responsibility.

Some people even step up,

and they don't have a role, a previously assigned fire role.

For example, building managers or staff of a restaurant, for example.

Sometimes we see people who didn't even have a prefire or

a prefire assigned roles step up, and take on those roles during an actual event.

So we're actually seeing the opposite of role abandonment.

We're seeing more people stepping up and helping others in a building fire.

And the consequences of thinking that role abandonment occurs is that we may

reduce the responsibility that we give to those who are best suited for the job.

If people are willing to stand up and take certain roles in fires,

and make sure that the procedures they're being followed appropriately, and

we know they're gonna be there, if they're there that day, we know they're gonna

step up and do that, then we wanna make sure we give them the role.

And not be fearful that their role will be abandoned when push comes to shove.

And then finally, there is the myth of disaster shock or inactivity.

And the definition of this is disoriented thinking,

a general insensitivity to cues to the immediate environment.

Okay, and that's kind of just not be, having something happen, and

just being so much in shock to the immediate environment,

that they're not actually able to make any decisions or move.

Okay, and there are three important conclusions that we've seen

in past research that this appears most frequently with rapid onset,

low forewarned events, where there's widespread damage, injuries, and death.

Only a small proportion of the population is affected, and this lasts only for

a small period of time, maybe a few hours, not more than a few days.

And how is this relevant to building fires?

And we just don't see this kind of shock and inactivity,

I'm not saying it never happens, but it's not the norm.

It's not the dominant behavior that we're seeing in human behavior in fires.

Okay, it might be some people who are going through some initial shock,

that they have to kind of get through that initial period before they start

making decisions.

And these are the people who are gonna be more intimate with what's going on.

For the people who are kind of outside of the fire area, maybe a different floor,

but they still need to evacuate,

this is where we need to actually have them believe that something's going on.

These are the people we're gonna need to prompt.

We're gonna need to kind of provide them with a little bit more intensity,

that they need to do something about it,

because they're not witnessing some of these more intense cues.

For the people who are more intimate with the fire event itself,

this might be kind of an initial problem that they have, but just really not

the dominant reaction in building fires.

And a consequence, if we believe that this is the case for

the majority, then we won't anticipate that individuals help themselves or

others, which is really not the case.

In something as serious as what happened in 2001 in the World Trade Center

disaster, we were seeing people help their fellow coworkers, people who didn't even

know each other, in some very, very serious, very dangerous situations.

And so, if we believe that people are in such shock that they're not able to save

themselves or others, we may start to over commit emergency responders, right?

If we feel like people can't take their own action and help themselves or others,

we might have the fire department spend so much time in search and

rescue, and not enough time in taking care of the fire.

And this really is something that we just don't see that often.

Instead, we see the opposite, we see people helping each other,

we see strangers helping each other, we see people helping themselves.

And so this is an important myth to kind of debunk, so

that we understand how people act in building fires, and

we can commit our emergency responders to putting out the fire and other activities.

So to end the second module of human behavior and

fire, I wanted to just reiterate that there are certain believes or

myths about human behavior that should be further explained, and even debunked, and

I hope I've done that during this module.

The ideal situation is not likely to occur,

we've talked a little bit about when it could occur, and some things we could put

into place, so that people act more quickly, more efficiently,

but this is really not the norm in most cases, and we need to expect that.

And also, panic, role abandonment, and disaster shock are rare.

What Human Behavior in Fire is NOT [17:55]

The Effect of Fires on People, Property and the Environment

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