This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Growing up, many of us were taught to drop, cover and hold on during an earthquake. The guidance is straightforward, but how people actually respond when the ground starts shaking can be far more complicated.
Now, UC Berkeley researchers are studying what happens in those critical moments and how fear and risk perception influence people's actions. "Drop, cover and hold on provides important guidance for earthquake safety, but knowing the recommended action does not necessarily tell us how people will respond during a real earthquake," said civil engineering professor Luis Ceferino, who is leading a new study on earthquake risk perception. "Our own research, along with prior literature, suggests that people's perception of risk is key to what they do during an earthquake—and, more importantly, plays a critical role in how injuries occur." In fact, his recent fieldwork on the 2023 Türkiye and Syria earthquakes found that nearly 40% of building occupants surveyed felt "incapacitated or frozen" due to panic in response to the shaking, while very few successfully executed standard safety protocols.
Other studies have documented social responses during earthquakes, such as running because others were running or rushing to protect family members. These decisions can place people in greater danger, Ceferino said, but they are not factored into earthquake safety policies or guidelines. The reason seems to be a lack of information.
Current data on perceived risk is limited to post-event surveys, which cannot provide a complete or accurate picture of what happened. Because the surveys rely on people's memories, it's nearly impossible to connect reported experiences to metrics, such as the intensity of shaking at a specific location and time, without wall-to-wall sensors in place. UC Berkeley researchers—including Ph.D. students Yan Liu and Luis Cossio and postdoctoral scholar Yvonne Merino—are collaborating with the California Academy of Sciences to try to capture this missing information using a combination of earthquake simulations, virtual reality and real-time reporting.
"We're hoping to build a framework that will help us understand how risk perception—the fear that people have of getting injured—is modulated by the shaking intensity of the earthquake," said Ceferino, who also serves as director of the Disaster Risk Analysis Lab. "Getting answers would give us more information to develop policy, recommendations and guidance for what to do when there is an earthquake to further reduce people's risk of injury." To create a realistic earthquake experience, the researchers set out to synchronize the motion of the Shake House, an earthquake simulator at the California Academy of Sciences, with a virtual reality environment they developed showing objects moving and falling. After measuring the accelerations used by the Shake House to simulate the powerful 1906 San Francisco and 1989 Loma Prieta earthquakes, they calibrated their virtual reality environment accordingly.
So when participants saw things falling in virtual reality, the physics corresponded to the shaking they felt. "By synchronizing what participants see in virtual reality with the shaking they physically feel, we can create a much more immersive representation of an indoor earthquake," Ceferino explained. "For earthquake engineers, this gives us a new way to go beyond computational models and study how people perceive risk and make decisions as earthquakes unfold." Prior to the start of the experiment, the 50 participants filled out a survey about their earthquake knowledge and whether they had ever experienced a large quake.
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