Crowd dynamics of behavioural intention: train station and museum case studies

Abstract

As the human population grows so does the need to understand human behaviour. One particularly important aspect of human behaviour is how it changes within conglomerations of people (i.e. crowds). In this article, a method for modelling crowd behaviour is proposed. This method draws inspiration from the concept of behavioural intention and the related forces of attitudes, influences, and social norms. These topics are first defined and detailed, followed by a survey of related research. Next, the model is presented and adapted to two common crowd dynamic scenarios, which stress a component of behavioural intention. Finally, observations are made about the model, as well as extensions to the models and directions for future research are considered. IntroductionThe capacity to predict and better understand human behaviour is a powerful tool for improving nearly any computational endeavour that involves human interaction such as architecture design, evacuation planning, crowd control, or disaster response. As the human population has grown in number and spread across the planet, so has the opportunity for humanity to demonstrate special forms of behaviour observed when masses of people gather together and form crowds. Crowd studies have been further augmented by the maturation of the social and psychological sciences and by the development of computer technology powerful enough for modelling and simulation.Alongside contributing factors such as industrialisation and the rise of cities, Reicher (2001) marks the French Third Republic as the 'birthplace of crowd psychology'. Reicher supports this claim with an example of the debate between Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde in the 1890s. This debate concerned the struggle to distinguish between individual and crowd forces and how to determine criminal responsibility in a crowd. These concerns remain a problem that merits investigation to this day. The 1890s also saw Gustave Le Bon (1895) develop his theories of the crowd mind, observing that other forces must be at work as concentrated masses of people are more than just the sum of their component individuals. Therefore, the rising prevalence of crowds and opportunities to observe them have continued to spawn new lines of research and debate throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. 165 Related to, and often part of, crowd research is the study and modelling of individual behaviour. The term 'individual' does not imply that such models isolate a person from others. Rather, individual behaviour models incorporate endogenous attitudes originating from within the person and account for the outside effects of physical and social influences. As a result, which forces are most important, their effects, and how they interact with each other have become a target of extensive study and many different models have been proposed. Among these proposed models are Fishbein and Ajzen's (1981) theory of reasoned action (TRA), and the many models that have been inspired by and descend from it. A variety of model compo...