Templeton, Anne, Drury, John and Philippides, Andy (2018) Walking together: behavioural signatures of psychological crowds. Royal Society Open Science. ISSN 2054-5703

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Abstract

Research in crowd psychology has demonstrated key differences between the behaviour of physical crowds where members are in the same place at the same time, and the collective behaviour of psychological crowds where the entire crowd perceive themselves to be part of the same group through a shared social identity. As yet, no research has investigated the behavioural effects that a shared social identity has on crowd movement at a pedestrian level. To investigate the direction and extent to which social identity influences the movement of crowds, 280 trajectories were tracked as participants walked in one of two conditions: 1) a psychological crowd primed to share a social identity; 2) a naturally occurring physical crowd. Behaviour was compared both within and between the conditions. In comparison to the physical crowd, members of the psychological crowd i) walked slower, ii) walked further, and iii) maintained closer proximity. In addition, pedestrians who had to manoeuvre around the psychological crowd behaved differently to pedestrians who had to manoeuvre past the naturally occurring crowd. We conclude that the behavioural differences between physical and psychological crowds must be taken into account when considering crowd behaviour in event safety management and computer models of crowds.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Crowd movement, social identity, pedestrian movement, pedestrian modelling
Schools and Departments:	School of Engineering and Informatics > Informatics School of Psychology > Psychology
Research Centres and Groups:	Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics
Depositing User:	Ellena Adams
Date Deposited:	02 Jul 2018 09:46
Last Modified:	14 Nov 2018 18:09
URI:	http://srodev.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/76813

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