Fight or flight? Behaviour and experiences of laypersons in the face of an incipient fire

Within minutes, an incipient fire can develop into a life-threatening full fire. Consequently, it should be fought as early as possible. But are laypersons capable of doing this? In such a situation, how do they behave and feel? These questions are addressed in the current study. Persons without any professional firefighting training (N = 64) were confronted in two experimental runs with a real incipient fire in the form of a burning pillow. The results show that most participants were motivated and able to extinguish the fire successfully. However, most of them made a number of mistakes. Of central importance for extinguishing the fire was self-efficacy. Furthermore, participants improved greatly in the second round, especially regarding reaction time span and various psychological variables (e.g. stress, mood). Particularly on the basis of these exercise effects, we can derive a number of practical implications. Practitioner Summary: Laypersons are willing and able to successfully fight an incipient fire. Yet, their behaviour is not optimal and could lead to self-endangerment. Thus, it is critically important that people perform practical exercises as part of fire safety trainings and repeat them after some time. Abbreviatons: TPB: theory of planned behaviour; CIT: critical incident technique; MANOVA: multivariate analysis of variance.