In contemporary social psychology, gatherings are often scaled down to phenomena observed in (small) groups. On the contrary, large groups of people usually move in a quite orderly and cooperative manner, assistance is frequently given to others, even in dangerous situations and among strangers. By and large, crowds do not behave in an irrational and anti-social way. Their concept of the collective mind and their negative perspective of the crowd (as being primarily emotional, irrational, anti-social and politically dangerous) have been shown to be empirically inappropriate and conceptually problematic. However, those who made the term crowd psychology well known at the end of the 19 th century and beginning of the 20 th century–most prominently Gustave Le Bon–make crowd psychology unpopular nowadays. In the following, these fields are roughly outlined.Ĭrowd psychology first comes to mind when searching for a psychological perspective on gatherings. This article aims at combining a natural scientific perspective on the dynamics of pedestrians with sociological and psychological concepts of action and behavior. However, integrative and interdisciplinary frameworks have only rarely been developed. The need for interdisciplinary work is indicated by the many papers in the natural sciences that mention social or psychological aspects. Therefore notions such as crowd, collective behavior, mass panic or mob convey diverse meanings. People at gatherings appear in physics as self-driven particles, in traffic engineering as pedestrians, in computer science as autonomous agents, in social psychology as groups and in sociology as collective actors–to name but a few examples. Numerous academic disciplines focus on situations in which large numbers of people use a common space and timeframe–known as gatherings. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant number: 13N12045. All participants signed a written informed consent and agreed to publication of pictures and videos shown in this article.įunding: The experiments were part of the project "Basigo – Bausteine für die Sicherheit von Großveranstaltungen". This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All video recordings and trajectories are available from the following database. Received: DecemAccepted: ApPublished: June 7, 2017Ĭopyright: © 2017 Sieben et al. Chialvo, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas, ARGENTINA The results from the questionnaire study do not always conform to objective physical measures, indicating the limitations of models which are based on objective physical measures alone and which neglect subjective perspectives.Ĭitation: Sieben A, Schumann J, Seyfried A (2017) Collective phenomena in crowds-Where pedestrian dynamics need social psychology. Markedly different expectations, social norms and strategies are associated with the two spatial structures. Secondly, a questionnaire study (n = 60) reveals how people perceive and evaluate these entrance situations. Density, waiting time and speed of progress show large variations. Firstly, physical measurements show the influence of the spatial structure on the dynamics of the entrance procedure. Methods from the natural and social sciences are applied. These two structures correspond to everyday situations such as boarding trains and access to immigration desks. To demonstrate the necessity of this framework, an experiment in which a large group of people (n = 270) enters a concert hall through two different spatial barrier structures is analyzed. They permit a clear discrimination between situations in which minimal models from the natural sciences are appropriate and those in which sociological and psychological concepts are needed. To show where pedestrian dynamics need social psychology in addition to the natural sciences we propose the application of three categories–phenomena, behavior and action. However, pedestrians in crowds also behave as living beings according to stimulus-response mechanisms or act as human subjects on the basis of social norms, social identities or strategies. Pedestrians are analyzed and modeled as driven particles revealing self-organizing phenomena and complex transport characteristics. To date pedestrian dynamics have been primarily studied in the natural and engineering sciences. This article is on collective phenomena in pedestrian dynamics during the assembling and dispersal of gatherings.
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