The lab is sealed. You have 45 minutes.
A cooperative escape room built by the STATS Lab at Claremont McKenna College — and a live research study on how leadership actually emerges in a team under pressure. Bring three friends, or come alone and we'll place you.
Zombie Apocalypse at CMC
An infection has swept the campus. Your team of four takes refuge in an abandoned research lab rumored to hold the prototype cure. The lead researcher vanished days ago. The banging on the barricaded door is getting louder.
Where do you even start?
More is in front of you than four people can work through in order. What your team takes on first, what it sets aside, and who makes that call are decisions nobody assigns you.
You won't all see the same thing
Some challenges hand each of you a different vantage point. Solving them is less about being clever than about describing what's in front of you clearly enough for someone else to act on it.
Nobody has the whole story
What you recover is partial, out of order, and doesn't line up on its own. The cure only comes back together when the team pools fragments and argues its way to an answer.
We built a game to watch teams solve problems
Most leadership research asks people to fill out a survey about a team they were on last semester. We wanted to watch it happen instead. The escape room is a controlled setting where a team of strangers has a hard shared goal, a hard deadline, and deliberately unequal information — the conditions under which someone actually steps up and leads.
Every puzzle in the room is designed around a construct: who emerges as a leader and how quickly, how information moves between people who can't see what each other sees, whose advice gets taken and whose gets ignored, and how a team splits into subgroups under time pressure.
The study is run by the STATS Lab at Claremont McKenna College, directed by Dr. Steven Zhou.
What participating involves
- ▸One session, about 60 minutes total — 45 minutes in the room plus a short questionnaire before and after.
- ▸Sessions are video and audio recorded so we can code communication and coordination behavior.
- ▸Recordings are stored securely, seen only by trained members of the research team, and never published or shown with you identifiable.
- ▸Reported results are always aggregated across teams. No individual is named in any publication.
- ▸Participation is voluntary. You can stop at any point, for any reason, with no penalty.
- ▸You'll get the full consent form to read and sign when you arrive, before anything is recorded.
Questions? szhou@cmc.edu
What a session looks like
Plan for about an hour on campus, start to finish.
Arrival & consent
Meet your team, read and sign the consent form, complete a short pre-session questionnaire.
Briefing
A research assistant reads the scenario, hands out your color, gets you set up with the cameras, and starts the clock. No prior escape room experience needed — everything you need is in the room.
The room · 45 minutes
Each stage builds on the one before it. We won't spoil what's in the room — everything you need is in there, and no outside knowledge helps. Hints are available if you get truly stuck, and asking for one is part of the data, not a failure. The door is never physically locked: the countdown is part of the story, and you can step out at any time, for any reason.
Debrief
A short post-session questionnaire about your team, then a quick debrief on what the room was actually studying and time to ask us anything you're curious about.
Teams are exactly four people
No more, no less — the room doesn't work otherwise. Tell us how you're coming, pick a session time that works, and add your details. Sign up solo and we'll seat you with others who chose the same time; bring friends; or lock in a whole room for your team of four.
A confirmation is on its way to the email(s) you entered. Questions: szhou@cmc.edu
Before you sign up
Do I have to know my teammates?
No. Plenty of people sign up alone and get placed with three others. Teams of strangers are genuinely useful to us — that's where leader emergence is most visible, because nobody starts with an assumed role.
Why does it have to be exactly four?
The room is built around four separate streams of information and four physical roles. With three people, one stream goes unread and the final puzzle can't be solved. With five, someone has nothing to do and the data isn't comparable to other sessions. So: four, every time.
My friend and I want to be on the same team but sign up separately.
Either sign up as a group of two in one go, or have one person sign up first and send you the six-character team code from the confirmation email. Use "Join a team with a code" and you'll land in the same team.
What if my team never fills up?
We're actively recruiting, and we hold sign-ups in a pool until a fourth person appears. If we can't fill your team within a couple of weeks we'll email you rather than leave you waiting.
Who can participate?
Anyone! We're using this escape room to pursue several interconnected studies, each focused on a different participant population, so we're happy to have anyone — student, faculty, staff, or community member — take part. For the Fall 2026 semester we're particularly interested in recruiting teams whose members are all currently employed on the same work team (for example, employees in the same department) — this can be at Claremont or any local company.
Where is the escape room?
We're located in the modular units on CMC campus, between Bauer and the Roberts Pavilion, in room E12. A detailed map and parking information will be provided upon signup.
Am I actually locked in?
No. The door is never physically locked — the “lock” is part of the story, not a real one. You're free to leave at any time, and in an emergency you should. There's always a research assistant nearby, and stepping out never counts against you.
Is there any prize or payment?
This is a volunteer research study, so there's no payment. You get the room, a debrief on what we're studying and the chance to ask us about it, and — if you're in a course that offers it — potential research participation credit. Ask your instructor.
What if I need to change my time or cancel?
Just reply to your confirmation email, or write to info@statslabatcmc.com, and our lab team will take care of it. Please give us as much notice as you can — a no-show means three other people lose their session, since we can't run with fewer than four.
Will the recordings ever be made public?
No. Recordings are coded by trained research assistants and stored on secure institutional storage. Published results are statistical summaries across many teams. Nothing identifiable is shared outside the research team.