Effects of intuition and deliberation on escape judgment and decision-making under different complexities of crisis situations

Abstract

We present novel evidence showing that people prefer searching for an exit and avoiding smoke rather than following the crowd regardless whether with intuition or deliberation when the crisis situation was activated. Intuition leads to more obvious preferences on escape judgment and decision-making than does deliberation under unconscious priming condition. People are more cautious with decision-making than judgment across two experiments. Priming method was adopted because the same primes tend to activate different associative links for different people (Cameron et al., 2012). Across two experiments, reliable and consistent evidence shows that when facing a crisis (e.g., fire), searching for an exit and avoiding smoke are preferred by people rather than following the crowd. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that searching for an exit and avoiding smoke were judged as more helpful than following the crowd by both intuition and deliberation regardless whether the situation is simple or complex. In Experiment 2, we found that intuition has a more significant influence on judgment and decision-making than deliberation under both simple and complex situations. Our findings contribute to the crisis literature by demonstrating that people less prefer to follow the crowd when escaping from crisis situations, and that intuition is more effective under unconscious priming condition.