Effects of gunfire location information and guidance on improving survival in virtual mass shooting events

Mass shooting events threaten people's safety with growing frequency and casualties. However, occupants may have difficulties behaving properly for survival because of a lack of information. Although gunfire locations and emergency guidance can be provided to occupants by technological advances, the effects of providing such information and guidance are unclear because occupants' survival-related behaviors are complicated and might be influenced by social cues and other factors. In this paper, the effects of providing the information and guidance on occupants' survivability are studied in a virtual reality experiment, and it is found that participants were more likely to survive if information about a shooter's gunfire location was provided than not. To obtain generalizable findings, participants' behavior of looking for the shooter is identified by examining their visual information, and results show that providing the information could shorten the time length of looking at the shooter. However, it remains to be determined how participants utilized the information about shooter's positions to select a safe route. This was addressed by testing different hypotheses through contrasting the goodness of fit for each hypothesized model. The results suggest that participants tend to predict the shooter's movement with the information they perceived. Furthermore, it is revealed that social influences affected participants who might follow others and collide with them, and such influences were weakened by providing information. These results suggest that providing gunfire locations can indeed improve occupants' survivability, comparing to the case with no information provided.