Welcome to Season 2 of Uncovered Witness: Fire Science Revelations! This season, the show's theme is Humans as part of a fire safety engineered system. In this series, we will unravel our understanding of human behaviour in fires and how this complex behaviour may be accounted for in the fire-safe design of buildings. Our understanding of the occupant response, decision-making process and biases may influence our design of exits and improve (or impede) the egress process.

This episode is all about human behaviour theories - useful concepts that allow us to explain some of the behaviour observed in real-world fire incidents and evacuation drills. We learn about the behavioural sequence model, which explains the sequence of actions taken in the pre-evacuation time. Then, we move to the social influence model, which explains how normative and informative social influence influences people's actions. The first relates to the rules and social norms in the environment where the evacuation occurs and how people are afraid to not break those rules even while in danger. The informative social influence refers to how we use others as our source of information or to confirm our own choices.

Further in the episode, we discuss the role-rule model and how our roles in our normal lives remain the same in the evacuation context. We try to define how these roles may be disturbed and how establishing a new hierarchy for evacuation may streamline the process.

Guests featured in this podcast episode:

• Prof. Daniel Nilsson, University of Canterbury, Halliwell Fire Research
• Josh Gibbons, Halliwell Fire Research

This show is produced by the Fire Science Media for Halliwell Fire Research. Executive producer - Monika Węgrzyńska, scripting and production - Monika and Wojciech Węgrzyńscy, sound engineer - Mikołaj Jarząbek. All rights reserved. 2024.