Understanding crowd responses to emergencies using virtual reality and social psychological methods
Our project brings together research from crowd psychology and evacuation research to design and build virtual reality experiments that explore crowd responses to perceived threats. This summary outlines some of the main advantages and considerations that we have found when combining our research areas. We discuss novel ways to overcome practical and ethical limitations when researching responses to emergencies and behaviour in large groups, methodological advances that address common issues such as interdependence of data and experimental control, the ability to integrate and test theory into study design, and the benefits of triangulating diverse data collection methods to understand how and why crowd reactions occur in emergencies in real-time.