‘Herding’ in direction choice-making during collective escape of crowds: How likely is it and what moderates it?

Abstract

The most likely responses of humans in emergency escape scenarios is not perfectly understood and many of the current behavioural assumptions are speculative. Because of the insufficiency of empirical evidence, certain assumptions and terminologies in this area have been derived from analogical experiments with non-human crowds (e.g. ants or mice, as models of humans) or from purely numerical analyses. Some have suggested that stressful collective escape situations trigger an increased tendency to imitate the decision of the majority, the so-called ‘herd-behaviour’ assumption. Here, we empirically test this assumption using a series of novel experiments with human crowds. Individual-level ob..