Study of Human Choices Under Social and Environmental Influence

The goal of this proposal is to further the understanding of individual-level human choices when influencing factors are applied. This understanding could help a multitude of fields such as transportation safety, building safety (egress), and influence propagation within social networks. Ergonomics form the basis of this interdisciplinary research. The majority of the research performed within this proposal was performed in simulations of simplified real-world interactions. Influencing factors were studied and applied to determine the effect on human choices for pedestrian crossings, building egress, and opinion propagation in social networks. The simulations and experimental designs were developed to mitigate extraneous information presented to the research participants and isolate the studied factors.