Citation

Rzezonka J, Chraibi M, Seyfried A, Hein B, Schadschneider A. R. Soc. Open Sci. 2022; 9(6): 211822.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Royal Society Publishing)

DOI

10.1098/rsos.211822

PMID

35706660

PMCID

PMC9156912

Abstract

It has been realized that the distinction between social-psychological effects and physical effects in pedestrian crowds is complex, and so the relevance of social psychology for the properties of pedestrian streams is still discussed controversially. Although physics-based models appear to capture many properties rather accurately, it was argued that simple systems of self-driven particles could not explain certain emergent phenomena. In particular, results from a recent empirical study of pedestrian flow at bottlenecks have been interpreted as indicating the relevance of social psychology even in relatively simple scenarios of crowd dynamics. The study showed a surprising dependence of the density near the bottleneck on the width of the corridor leading to it. The density increased with increasing corridor width, although a wider corridor provides more space for pedestrians. It has been argued that this observation is a consequence of social norms, which trigger the effect by a preference for queuing in such situations. However, convincing evidence for this hypothesis is still missing. Here, we reconsider this scenario from a physics perspective using computer simulations of a simple microscopic velocity-based model.

Language: en

Keywords

bottleneck; crowds; pedestrian; physics; simulation; social psychology