Can cooperation slow down emergency evacuations?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cooperation among pedestrians in low-visibility corridors affects evacuation efficiency, revealing that altruistic behavior can sometimes hinder rather than help evacuation processes.

Contribution

It introduces a lattice model to analyze the impact of cooperation and buddying thresholds on crowd evacuation dynamics in obscured environments.

Findings

Cooperation can slow down evacuation in certain conditions.

Altruistic behavior may increase disaster risk.

Buddying thresholds influence crowd flow and safety.

Abstract

We study the motion of pedestrians through obscure corridors where the lack of visibility hides the precise position of the exits. Using a lattice model, we explore the effects of cooperation on the overall exit flux (evacuation rate). More precisely, we study the effect of the buddying threshold (of no--exclusion per site) on the dynamics of the crowd. In some cases, we note that if the evacuees tend to cooperate and act altruistically, then their collective action tends to favor the occurrence of disasters.