The Madness of Crowds.

The future belongs to crowds.

Don Delillo, Mao II

A crowded stadium.

If you have ever been in a huge crowd, at a sports event, a pop concert or a demonstration, then you may have experienced or witnessed some of the strange features of people’s collective behavior. The crowd is not being organized as a whole. Everyone responds to what is going on next to them, but nonetheless the crowd can suddenly change its behavior over a large area, with disastrous results. A gentle plodding procession can turn into a panic-stricken crush with people trying to move in all directions.

Understanding these dynamics is important.

•  If a fire breaks out or an explosion occurs near a large crowd, how will people behave? 
• What sort of escape routes and general exits should be planned in large stadiums?
• How should religious pilgrimages of millions of worshippers to Mecca be organized so as to avoid repeating the deaths of hundreds of pilgrims that have occurred in the past, as panic generates a human stampede in response to overcrowding?

Concert pictures from stage

One of the interesting insights that informs recent studies of crowd behavior and control is the analogy between the flow of a crowd and the flow of a liquid.At first one might think that understanding crowds of different people, all with different potential responses to a situation, and different ages and degrees of understanding of the situation, would be a hopeless task, but surprisingly, this is not the case. People are more alike than we might imagine. Simple local choices can quickly result in an overall order in a crowded situation. When you arrive at one of London’s big rail terminiand head down to the Underground system, you will find that people descending will have chosen the left- (or right-) hand stair, while those ascending will keep to the other one. Along the corridors to the ticket barriers the crowd will organize itself into two separate streams moving in opposite directions. Nobody planned all that or put up notices demanding it: it arose as a result of individuals taking their cue from what they observed in their close vicinity.This means that they act in response to how people move in their close vicinity and how crowded it is getting. Responses to the second factor depend a lot on who you are. If you are a Japanese manager used to travelling through the rush hour on the Tokyo train system, you will respond very differently to a crush of people around you than if you are a tourist visitor from the Scottish Isles or a school group from Rome. If you are minding young or old relatives, then you will move in a different way, linked to them and watching where they are. All these variables can be taught to computers that are then able to simulate what will happen when crowds congregate in different sorts of space and how they will react to the development of new pressures.

Crowds seem to have three phases of behavior, just like a flowing liquid. When the crowding is not very great and the movement of the crowd is steady in one direction – like the crowd leaving Wembley Stadium for Wembley Park Underground station after a football match – it behaves like a smooth flow of a liquid. The crowd keeps moving at about the same speed all the time and there is no stopping and starting. However, if the density of people in the crowd grows significantly, they start pushing against one another and movement starts to occur in different directions. The overall movement becomes more staccato in character, with stop-go behavior, rather like a succession of rolling waves.

crowded place

 The gradual increase in the density of bodies will reduce the speed at which they can move forward, and there will be attempts to move sideways if people sense that things might move forwards faster that way. It is exactly the same psychology as cars swopping lanes in a dense, slow-moving traffic jam. In both cases it sends ripples through the jam, which cause some people to slow and some people to shift sideways to let you in. A succession of those staccato waves will run through the crowd. They are not in themselves necessarily dangerous, but they signal the possibility that something much more dangerous could suddenly happen. The closer and closer packing of people in the crowd starts to make them behave in a much more chaotic fashion, like a flowing liquid becoming turbulent, as people try to move in any direction so as to find space.

They push their neighbors and become more vigorous in their attempts to create some personal space. This increases the risk of people falling, becoming crushed together so closely that breathing is difficult or children becoming detached from their parents. These effects can start in different places in a big crowd and their effects will spread quickly. The situation rapidly snowballs out of control The fallers become obstacles over which others fall. Anyone with claustrophobia will panic very quickly and react even more violently to close neighbors. Unless some type of organized intervention occurs to separate parts of the crowd from other parts and reduce the density of people, a disaster is now imminent. The transition from smooth pedestrian flow to staccato movement and then crowd chaos can take anything from a few minutes to half an hour, depending on the size of the crowd. It is not possible to predict if and when a crisis is going to occur in a particular crowd, but, by monitoring the largescale behavior, the transition to the staccato movement can be spotted in different parts of a big crowd and steps taken to alleviate crowding at the key pressure points that are driving the transition where chaos will set in

Also Read:- The Lead in Your Pencil.

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Image Credit :- Pixabay

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