NDLI: Disentangling the impact of social groups on response times and movement dynamics in evacuations.

Content Provider	Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Author	Nikolai W. F. Bode Stefan Holl Wolfgang Mehner Armin Seyfried
Abstract	Crowd evacuations are paradigmatic examples for collective behaviour, as interactions between individuals lead to the overall movement dynamics. Approaches assuming that all individuals interact in the same way have significantly improved our understanding of pedestrian crowd evacuations. However, this scenario is unlikely, as many pedestrians move in social groups that are based on friendship or kinship. We test how the presence of social groups affects the egress time of individuals and crowds in a representative crowd evacuation experiment. Our results suggest that the presence of social groups increases egress times and that this is largely due to differences at two stages of evacuations. First, individuals in social groups take longer to show a movement response at the start of evacuations, and, second, they take longer to move into the vicinity of the exits once they have started to move towards them. Surprisingly, there are no discernible time differences between the movement of independent individuals and individuals in groups directly in front of the exits. We explain these results and discuss their implications. Our findings elucidate behavioural differences between independent individuals and social groups in evacuations. Such insights are crucial for the control of crowd evacuations and for planning mass events.
e-ISSN	19326203
DOI	10.1371/journal.pone.0121227
Journal	PLoS ONE
Issue Number	3
Volume Number	10
Language	English
Publisher	Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Publisher Date	2015-01-01
Publisher Place	United States
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Medicine Science
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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