Assessing Mental Models of Emergencies Through Two Knowledge Elicitation Tasks.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Risk Communication
• Emergency Management

Background:

• Many individuals do not follow recommendations in emergency warnings.
• Previous research has not adequately explored the cognitive processes influencing emergency decision-making.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate risk identification within mental models using standard elicitation techniques.
• To investigate the relationship between university campus alerts and these mental models.

Main Methods:

• Study 1: Analyzed two years of emergency alerts from a southeastern university.
• Study 2: Participants listed perceived emergencies in a thought-listing task.
• Study 3: Measured the time taken by participants to classify situations as emergencies.

Main Results:

• University alerts focused on armed persons, theft, and fire.
• Participant-listed emergencies included fire, car accidents, heart attacks, and theft.
• Participants rapidly identified bombs, murder, fire, tornadoes, and rape as emergencies, but slowly identified suspicious packages and identity theft.

Conclusions:

• Individuals must perceive a situation as serious to categorize it as an emergency and act on warnings.
• Adherence to emergency warnings is only somewhat linked to current mental models.
• Understanding mental representations of emergencies is crucial for addressing ignored warnings.