The Psychology of Lost

1. What they did

Kenneth Hill wrote this introductory chapter for the book Lost Person Behavior. He looks at being lost from a psychological point of view, to help search and rescue (SAR) teams understand what lost people think, feel and do.

He draws on:

• Psychological research on sense of direction, mental maps, children’s spatial development and the effects of emotion on thinking.
• His own SAR work in Nova Scotia, Canada: structured interviews with rescued lost persons soon after (sometimes during) their recovery, a survey and interviews with 120 deer hunters, and a review of over 800 lost person reports.
• A case study of two children lost overnight together in November.

2. What they found

What “lost” means

• A lost person cannot place where they are in relation to known places, and has no effective way to reorient. Both parts matter: many people are unsure of their position without being lost, because they have a plan to get out.
• Some missing people are not lost in this sense, such as an overdue hiker, an injured skier, a person with Alzheimer’s disease, or someone who is depressed and does not want to be found.
• Most people, most of the time, are much less oriented than they think. “Knowing where you are” often just means knowing the right route.

Sense of direction

• No controlled study has found that people can sense magnetic north. Even expert wayfinders in cultures where navigation is vital get turned around, and their skill comes from training that starts in early childhood.
• People with a good sense of direction keep mentally updating their position as they move, mostly from what they see but also from the feel of their own movement. They usually use an anchoring direction, such as the direction they entered the woods, rather than north.
• Deer hunters may be at extra risk: while circling through the brush to get downwind of a deer, they can lose their “safety bearing.” Many lost hunters are found travelling in the opposite direction from where they entered. Hill suggests hikers and nature photographers are at less risk, but says this rests only on the apparent share of each group among search subjects.

Finding the way

• Local residents often have good route knowledge (trails, survey lines, all-terrain vehicle roads not on maps) but little survey knowledge, so they cannot show these on a map but can take searchers there.
• Most children under about eight or nine may struggle to build useful mental maps. Around age eight they become fascinated by short cuts, and lost children aged about eight to twelve were often trying a short cut.
• Young children often “don’t know that they don’t know” the way, so they may follow an animal into the forest without thinking of the return trip.

How lost people try to reorient

• Random traveling: moving with no plan, often in the first panic; most people settle down, but some school-age children keep doing it.
• Route traveling (“trail running”): following an unknown trail or drainage, rarely turning back; usually ineffective, mostly seen in school-age children under 12.
• Direction traveling: heading cross country in one direction, even crossing roads and power lines; rarely effective, and seen in some overconfident hunters.
• Route sampling: trying each trail from an intersection and coming back; sometimes used by older children and teens, and can work with backtracking.
• Direction sampling: the same, from a landmark kept in view.
• View enhancing: climbing a hill, ridge or tree to see landmarks; a favourite of experienced outdoorsmen.
• Backtracking: retracing the exact route in. This can be very effective, but lost people are reluctant to turn back. Someone who can read tracks should be able to follow their own signs back, though this can be hard: SAR lore tells of a once-famous tracker who could not follow his own trail out and was rescued by a colleague following it.
• Using folk wisdom: for example “all streams lead to civilization,” which in Nova Scotia is more likely to lead to a swamp.
• Staying put: recommended by every woods safety programme, but rarely done on purpose. In over 800 Nova Scotia reports, only two people stayed put deliberately: an 11-year-old boy with Hug-a-Tree training and an 80-year-old apple picker. Most lost people are found stationary because they are tired, asleep or unconscious.
• Hunters who had been lost several times were significantly less likely to rate “follow a stream” as useful.

Emotion

• Almost every lost person Hill interviewed had been upset, some (especially children) to the point of nausea and stomach pain.
• Moderate arousal helps thinking; very high arousal scatters thoughts and narrows what a person notices, so familiar places may not be recognized. Fear pushes people to move rather than stay put.
• Children and many adults fear the woods for what might be there (animals, darkness, strangers). Lost children often hide from searchers or ignore their calls, because everything strange frightens them.
• “Woods shock,” a near-complete loss of rational thought, can affect experienced outdoorsmen too.

Lost together

• One third to one half of lost person incidents involve more than one person. In Nova Scotia, groups always stayed together and travelled about as far as people lost alone.
• Hill’s strong impression from interviews is that people lost with companions are less scared and more rational, especially school-age children.

Two lost children

A 13-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, playing at stomping dead trees, became lost near dusk. They tried backtracking along the broken trees, then wandered, climbed a hill and trees to look for houses, and spent a cold night without making a shelter or talking much. Next morning the boy tried direction sampling from their night spot. From a tree he heard a searcher calling, answered, and they were rescued.

3. What they concluded

• Being lost is a psychological state: a loss of orientation plus no effective way to regain it. Most people’s orientation is less accurate than they believe.
• Wayfinding is a learned skill, not an instinct. It depends on noticing the right cues, such as landmarks where a route changes direction, and remembering the routes travelled.
• People may mistake route knowledge for survey knowledge, which can leave them vulnerable to getting turned around.
• Lost people use a range of reorientation strategies, some much more effective than others, and most try more than one.
• High emotional arousal and fear interfere with clear thinking, even in experienced people, but people lost in groups may be calmer and more rational.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The chapter did not use tracking as a research method. Tracking appears in two ways. Backtracking, following one’s own route or tracks back out, is described as one of the most effective ways for a lost person to reorient, for those with the skill and patience. The two lost children tried backtracking along the trees they had broken but gave up because there were deadfalls everywhere. The chapter is written for searchers, and its descriptions of how lost people move are background for searching and following lost people.