Most people learn from a young age to drop, cover, and hold on during an earthquake. But research from UC Berkeley suggests that knowing the right move and actually doing it are two very different things.
Civil engineering professor Luis Ceferino is leading a new study on how fear and risk perception shape people's actions when the ground starts shaking. His 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, according to Phys.org.
Other studies have found similar patterns. People have been documented running because others were running, or rushing to protect family members during earthquakes. Those decisions can put people in greater danger, Ceferino said, but current earthquake safety policies and guidelines do not account for them.
Part of the problem is a lack of data. Most information about how people behave during earthquakes comes from post-event surveys, which rely on memory and cannot link reported experiences to specific shaking intensity at a given place and time.
"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 Ceferino. "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."
To get better data, Ceferino and his team, including Ph.D. students Yan Liu and Luis Cossio and postdoctoral scholar Yvonne Merino, are collaborating with the California Academy of Sciences. They are combining earthquake simulations, virtual reality, and real-time reporting to capture what people experience in the moment.
The team synchronized the Shake House, an earthquake simulator at the California Academy of Sciences, with a virtual reality environment they developed. The VR environment shows objects moving and falling, creating a more immersive experience during simulated earthquakes.
"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," Ceferino said. "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."
Ceferino also serves as director of the Disaster Risk Analysis Lab at UC Berkeley.
