The influence of context effects on exit choice behavior during building evacuation combining virtual reality and discrete choice modeling

Abstract

Exit choice is critical to saving lives during a building evacuation. Numerous studies have examined how environmental factors, social interactions, and individuals’ internal factors affect exit choice behavior. However, due to their limited ability to perceive and combine these multi-attributes, people do not always make strategic and rational decisions but instead rely on preferences. The choice context can facilitate or hinder the evaluation of attributes, and thus preference reversals may occur in the same choice set but in different contexts. Researchers have long known that the context effect – i.e. preference reversals depending on the availability of other options – plays an important role in decision-making behavior. However, no research on decision-making behavior has been conducted that considers the context effect on exit choice during building evacuation. To fill this gap, we conducted a series of virtual reality (VR) experiments to examine the influence of context effect on exit choice. Before conducting the experiments, the validity of exit choice behavior in the VR-based method was analysed by comparing controlled experiments in both the real world and virtual environment. The results from our VR experiments provide novel and clear empirical evidence that contextual preference reversals involving three major effects, the compromise effect, the similarity effect, and the attraction effect, play an important role in exit choice during evacuation. Additionally, we compared three models for estimating discrete choice – expected utility theory (EUT), cumulative prospect theory (CPT), and accentuation of differences (AOD) – which primarily focus on the option attributes, the risk attitude of decision-makers, and the context of options, respectively. The outstanding performance of AOD, which is based on a psychophysical law and takes into account the impact of the context of options, highlights the psychological perspective of evacuees towards various option attributes and the importance of context effects in exit choice.