Measuring and Modeling Behavioral Decision Dynamics in Collective Evacuation

Abstract

Identifying and quantifying factors influencing human decision making remains an outstanding challenge, impacting the performance and predictability of social and technological systems. In many cases, system failures are traced to human factors including congestion, overload, miscommunication, and delays. Here we report results of a behavioral network science experiment, targeting decision making in a natural disaster. In a controlled laboratory setting, our results quantify several key factors influencing individual evacuation decision making in a controlled laboratory setting. The experiment includes tensions between broadcast and peer-to-peer information, and contrasts the effects of temporal urgency associated with the imminence of the disaster and the effects of limited shelter capacity for evacuees. Based on empirical measurements of the cumulative rate of evacuations as a function of the instantaneous disaster likelihood, we develop a quantitative model for decision making that captures remarkably well the main features of observed collective behavior across many different scenarios. Moreover, this model captures the sensitivity of individual- and population-level decision behaviors to external pressures, and systematic deviations from the model provide meaningful estimates of variability in the collective response. Identification of robust methods for quantifying human decisions in the face of risk has implications for policy in disasters and other threat scenarios, specifically the development and testing of robust strategies for training and control of evacuations that account for human behavior and network topologies.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 10, 2014
Accession Number
ADA614853

Entities

People

  • Danielle Bassett
  • David L. Alderson
  • Emily M. Craparo
  • Francisco Guiterrez-villarreal
  • Jean M. Carlson
  • Sean P. Stromberg
  • Thomas Otani

Organizations

  • University of California, Santa Barbara

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • California
  • Computational Science
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Science
  • Databases
  • Experimental Design
  • Human Behavior
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Maximum Likelihood Estimation
  • Military Research
  • Network Science
  • Probability
  • Social Media
  • Social Networking Services
  • Social Networks
  • United States

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.