The effect of social roles on group behaviour

TL;DR

This paper extends a pedestrian group dynamics model by incorporating social roles, purpose, and gender, revealing their effects on group behavior and velocity, supported by real-world data comparisons.

Contribution

It introduces the influence of social roles and purpose into the non-Newtonian pedestrian model, highlighting asymmetric interactions and phase transitions in group configurations.

Findings

Social roles significantly affect group velocity and formation.

Asymmetric gaze-based interactions influence group dynamics.

Crowd density induces phase transitions in group configurations.

Abstract

In a recent series of papers, we proposed a mathematical model for the dynamics of a group of interacting pedestrians. The model is based on a non-Newtonian potential, that accounts for the need of pedestrians to keep both their interacting partner and their walking goal in their vision field, and to keep a comfortable distance between them. These two behaviours account respectively for the angular and radial part of the potential from which the force providing the pedestrian acceleration is derived. The angular term is asymmetric, i.e. does not follow the third law of dynamics, with observable effects on group formation and velocity. We successfully compared the predictions of the model with observations of real world pedestrian behaviour. We then studied the effect of crowd density on group dynamics. We verified that the average effect of crowd density may be modelled by adding a harmonic term to the group potential. The model predictions, which include "phase transitions" in the group configuration, are again confirmed, at least in the observed density range, by a comparison with real world data. Until now we had averaged all pedestrian data collected in a given environmental setting without differentiating on group composition and social roles. In this work we study how the group configuration and velocity is affected by inter-pedestrian relation (family, couples, colleagues, friends), purpose (work, leisure) and gender. We also show results related to the effect of asymmetric interactions, that confirm further the non-Newtonian nature of gaze-based angular interaction in our model.