Panic That Spreads Sociobehavioral Contagion in Pedestrian Evacuations

Abstract

Crowds are a part of everyday public life, from stadiums and arenas to school hallways. Occasionally, pushing within the crowd spontaneously escalates to crushing behavior, resulting in injuries and even death. The rarity and unpredictability of these incidents provides few options to collect data for research on the prediction and prevention of hazardous emergent behaviors in crowds. This study takes a close look at the way states of agitation, such as panic, can spread through crowds. Group composition-mainly family groups composed of members with differing mobility levels-plays an important role in the spread of agitation through the crowd, ultimately affecting the exit density and evacuation clearance time of a simulated venue. This study used an agent-based model of pedestrian movement during the egress of a hypothetical room and adopted an emotional, cognitive, and social framework to explore the transference and dissipation of agitation through a crowd. The preliminary results reveal that average group size in a crowd is a primary contributor to the exit density and evacuation clearance time. The study provides the groundwork on which to build more elaborate models that incorporate sociobehavioral aspects to simulate human movement during panic situations and account for the potential for dangerous behavior to emerge in crowds.

Towards a mathematical theory of behavioral human crowds

“…107, 109 and 111) and even generation and contagion of panic under multi-hazard circumstances (see for instance Ref. 54).…”

A Cellular-Automaton Agent-Hybrid Model for Emergency Evacuation of People in Public Places

“…Since then, with the development of emergency evacuation theory, some achievements have been made in the study of emergency evacuation of people in public places at home and abroad. To study evacuation groups, Elzie et al established an agent-based pedestrian movement model and found that groups played a significant role in spreading panic and that evacuation efficiency was affected by the size of the group [2]. Li et al analyzed the factors affecting evacuations in subway stations from two aspects: individual characteristics of people and environment, and proposed a safety evacuation model for limited spaces.…”

Fear in Humans: A Glimpse into the Crowd-Modeling Perspective

“…This has a biological basis ( 53 ) and has been examined on a theoretical level on multiple occasions. For instance, Elzie et al ( 54 ) studied group dynamics under various emotional and cognitive conditions, allowing the spread of information to vary between simulations. The other common feature in these papers is the difficulty in comparing the results with real world data, given the lack of readily available data and the difficulty of obtaining experimental evidence.…”