Calm or panic? A game-based method of emotion contagion for crowd evacuation

Abstract

Panic in an emergency can be highly contagious; this can cause a situation to rapidly spin out of control, with serious consequences. Prior studies on emotion contagion have focused on panic and have ignored the rationality of pedestrians. Considering both panic and calm, this paper puts forward a new game theory-based crowd evacuation model incorporating emotion contagion. Transitions between three emotional states, i.e. infected, sensitive, and unchangeable, reveal the contagion of personalized emotions in the crowd. The influence of nearby pedestrians on an individual’s decision-making process is modeled using game theory. The proposed methodology is here applied to a real-world subway evacuation problem in Beijing. Simulation results show that emotion contagion has an important effect on pedestrian evacuation time. Moreover, calm pedestrians were found to be very effective at calming the crowd in an emergency. If management personnel can go deep into a crowd to calm pedestrians, then panic will be rapidly reduced.

KEYWORDS:

• Crowd evacuation
• panic
• calm
• emotion contagion
• game theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by grants from the National Social Science Foundation of China (grant number 20BGL001), which is required to be unique.