Experimental Study On Cognition And Conformity Of Group In Emergency Situation

Since 21 st century, emergency and crisis events occurred frequently. Especially, the group panic triggered by emergency has been tendency of increase, such as Shanghai stampede and Kenya fire stampede which impact seriously the social security and stability. In the emergency, people usually lose their head when facing the threat and damage. Should they make themselves calm down and think of countermeasures actively, or follow others? These realities caused this study on conformity in the emergency.Emergency describes anaccumulation of a series of negative factors, including serious threat, urgency and uncertainty. Therefore, the cognition and conformity of emergency are usually more complex than non-emergency. First, the most important features of the emergency is the threat and damage to people. It has resulted in the high level of emotional activation, including fear and alert, and so on. This high arousal emotion will harm people’s normal reasoning function. Second, the urgent of emergency can make people feel the time pressure and anxiety. Third, there is uncertainty of the emergency, including the uncertainty of the number of escape plans and the uncertainty of the performance of task. These uncertainties will increase the people’s desire for information. These three main traits of emergency have an important impact on the individual’s cognition and conformity. This paper was aimed to study the mechanism of cognition and conformity in the emergency.Taking the escaping in fire as an example, since current researchers on emergency could not risk human lives and let them participate in real fire, these research methods of fire escaping can be divided into three categories:computer simulation, exercises and experiments, as well as interviews and questionnaires method. By combining the research methodology for experimental and computer simulation, we developed a new methodology for researching emergency situations.This paper proposes that the conformity is the special decision and verifies that the cognition(performance of original decision and task) is the mediator between the level of emotional activation and conformity. This paper builds the hypothesis model of cognition and conformity in the emergency and uses five progressive experimental studies to verify the all hypothesisin the model.Study 1 design two kinds of situations(non-emergency situation or daily life situation vs. emergency situation) and verify that different situations influence levels of emotional activation.With 43 university students, combining the EEG power and subjective experience report of emotion, the finding shows emergency situation induce the more EEG power and higher level of emotional activation than non-emergency.Study 2 was a further exploration of study 1 by adding the cognitive task following the situations.The same 43 participants were ask to watch a recomposed video presenting a convincingstory about escaping from the emergency and complete several cognition tasks associated with two kinds of situations. The results not only verified the founding of study 1, but also find the cognition in emergency situation is significant lower than in non-emergency.Study 3 was a further exploration of Study 2, in which 168 participants were asked to watch the same story as study 2 and complete the task and test of conformity. Results revealed that individuals in an emergency situation experienced significantly lower performance of judgment task and higher conformity tendency than in a non-emergency situation. The causal effect of the situation on the performance of the judgment task was mediated by the level of emotional activation.Study 4 use the same cognitive question based on three aforementioned studies. However, options of question expend into three levels((1):two options;(2):three options;(3):four options). 168 participants, randomly assigned to three groups, were asked to work on cognitive tasks with different numbers of options. Results showed that the number of choices was negatively related to conformity and performance was a mediator between the number of choices and conformity.Based on the study 3, study 5 add the different branches into the story and expand the two types of task, including tasks of information influence and tasks of normative impression(social norms and helping).Comparing with study 3 under the control of Asch paradigm, 221 participants are tested the cognition and conformity behavior on information influence and social pressure under the control of the self-organization. The finding shows that the conformity under control of self-organization is significantly less than the conformity under control of Asch paradigm. Moreover, the finding shows that the conformity on task of information influence is more than the conformity on task of normative impression.In conclusion, this paper verifies the hypothesis model of conformity through five studies. The most hypothesis of cognition conformity is supported, except effect of elapsed time on conformity. Furthermore, there are theoretical and implicate supports.