Inducing and revealing cognitive biases in disaster evacuation: A serious game approach to metacognition and the cognition-behavior gap

Evacuation decisions during disasters are shaped by risk perception, warning information, social cues, prior experience, situational constraints, and cognitive biases. Among these factors, cognitive biases may delay or distort evacuation decisions, whereas conventional disaster education mainly provides knowledge and recommended actions without allowing learners to experience how such biases operate in real time. To address this gap, this study developed a serious game to foster metacognitive awareness of cognitive biases in disaster-evacuation decision-making. The game covered three disaster contexts requiring judgment under uncertainty: tsunami, flood, and volcanic eruption. Implemented in Unity, it was designed to induce bias-influenced decisions during both pre-evacuation and action phases. A pre–post experiment was conducted with 31 university students. Before and after gameplay, participants viewed scenario videos designed to elicit cognitive biases and answered questionnaires assessing evaluation, empathy, causal understanding, and behavioral choice. The results suggest that the game functioned not only as an explanatory tool but also as an experiential environment that induced and revealed bias-influenced judgments. Significant changes were found in evaluative and empathic responses, indicating enhanced reflection on bias-influenced decision-making, although the direction of change differed by bias type. However, improved understanding did not always lead to desirable behavioral change. Authority bias showed the opposite pattern, suggesting that greater awareness may sometimes increase reliance on external sources rather than strengthen independent judgment. These findings highlight the potential and limitations of serious games for disaster risk reduction.