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

Video examples from an experimental study by the University of Muenster, Germany, in cooperation with the German Fire Protection Association and the State Fire Service Institute NRW, Germany. The study is part of a larger research project and examined the behavior of laypersons when confronted with 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 study was approved by the ethics committee of the Department 7 of the University of Münster (ID 2018-16-MT) and pre-registered with AsPredicted.org under the number 20436 (https://aspredicted.org/8py33.pdf). The study was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (funding code FKZ 13N14208).

The video examples show 1) an expert handling the fire extinguisher spray and 2) the reaction of a typical participant confronted with an incipient fire.
Both persons agreed to the publication of these videos for demonstration purposes in events with limited number of participants (e.g. lectures); any commercial use is explicitly prohibited.