The aim of this work was to investigate whether social culture impacts how people respond to an evacuation alarm. As part of this work four unannounced library evacuations were conducted in the Czech Republic, Turkey, Poland and the UK. In an attempt to isolate social culture as the primary independent variable across the trials, the key parameters that are known to influence Response Phase behaviour and performance e.g. population demographics, type of structure, alarm system, etc were controlled across the trials. Response Phase behaviour was determined for a total of 477 individuals, 192 from Poland, 51 from Turkey, 70 from the Czech Republic and 104 from the UK. The results suggest that there are significant differences in the nature of the population behaviour during the Response Phase across the four trials. On average, the population with the quickest to the slowest response times are: Turkey, Poland, UK and Czech Republic. When applied to a simulated evacuation, the observed differences in response time distribution for the national groups resulted in significantly different evacuation performance
