Preliminary Study about Social Influence Over Wayfinding Decisions

Abstract

There are plenty of studies on social influence in various segments of research, but too few in the ergonomic design and communication area, and a lack of studies have evaluated the influence of others for our making decision. There are already works that study the effectiveness of safety signals in emergencies, evaluating which the people prefer to move along in the corridor, the results shown that, in a “T-type” intersection, users randomly chose which direction to follow. However, if there is an increment in the width of the side corridor, users tend to follow the wider corridor. When light is inserted, users also prefer to choose the corridors with more lighting .[1] The objective of this preliminary study is evaluate the efficacy of a virtual involvement to study decision making situations in a hurry situations with influence of others, where these others people will move in one direction, and will be checked if target audience will continue to walk by the normal route or will follow the others. The results show the people really might exert some influence in our decision making, the virtual involvement is effective for the study, but some adjustments were to be revised to increase immersion of the participants in the experiment, such as narrative and the interaction of virtual agents (VA) with the avatar.