Imitative (herd) behaviour in direction decision-making hinders efficiency of crowd evacuation processes

Abstract

Humans use social information to improve their decisions in scenarios that involve uncertainty. Previous research has shown that this social influence can have positive or negative outcomes depending on the context of decision and characteristics of the system. A particular scenario where the social information matters is the collective escape where behaviour of others could be used as an extra source of information and thus, influence the decision-making. The question is whether there could be any benefit for escaping human crowds to display imitative tendencies (or the so-called ‘herd’ behaviour) in their decision making. Here, we investigate this question in relation to exit direction dec..