People who design public spaces where crowding can be an issue will be intrigued by the findings of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (and available free of charge here: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.2089). A related press release reports that “A new model . . . takes the point of view of an individual crowd member, and is remarkably accurate at predicting actual crowd flow, its developers say. The model . . . illustrates the role of visual perception in crowd movement. It shows how crowd members who are visible from a participant’s viewpoint determine how that participant follows the crowd and what path they take. . . . findings from case studies like this could be extrapolated to other situations in which people or animals unconsciously coordinate their behavior — such as on social media. . . . In both situations, there is the same strong tendency for a person to imitate others around them. . . . [but] when one group starts to diverge too much from a person’s current ‘direction,’ the person will reject that group and follow another group moving in a less divergent direction.”
“Seen and ‘Herd’: Collective Motion in Crowds is largely Determined by Participants’ Field of Vision.” 2022. Press release, Brown University, https://www.brown.edu/news/2022-03-21/flocking
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.