Fear contagion situations in the context of the Social Force Model

FERNANDO E. CORNES; GUILLERMO A. FRANK; CLAUDIO O. DORSO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; StatPhys 27 International Conference on Statistical Physics; 2019

Departamento de Física, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Fear may spread over a crowd in a similar fashion as contagious diseases do in social groups. People in a life-threatening situationmay express fear alerting others of imminent danger. This social mechanism initiates an evacuation process, while affecting the waypeople try to escape. We developed a model that describe and reproduce the fear contagion mechanism, where many individualsmay suddenly switch to an anxious state. We focused on video analyses in order to obtain reliable parameters from a real fear-contagion events, and further test these parameters on computer simulations. We observed that two evacuation schemes mayappear, according to the pedestrians susceptibility. Both schemes exhibit different evacuation patterns and are qualitatively visible inthe available real life recordings of crowded events. We further investigated how the fear spreading gradually stops if the source ofdanger ceases.