Evolution law of selfish psychology in evacuating crowd and its influence on emergency escape

Abstract

Chemical parks possess unique high-risk attributes and catastrophic characteristics of accident consequences. Beyond the immediate casualties, the non-adaptive psychological behaviors of individuals often lead to more severe casualties. During the evacuation process in chemical accidents, the evolution of the crowd's psychological state, especially the development of selfishness and its impact mechanism on evacuation, still require in-depth research. In this study, AnyLogic was used to develop a system dynamics model of selfish psychological transmission, and parameter values pertaining to environmental attributes, crowd interactions, and group emotional development variables was established. The simulation analyzes the correlation between evacuees' psychological states and critical evacuation parameters, revealing the impact of evolving selfish psychology on the evacuation process under the interaction of various circumstances. The results indicate that when the panic level remains below 0.4, evacuation resources significantly influence the prevalence of pathological selfishness. As the availability of evacuation resources diminishes, a growing proportion of individuals exhibit pathological selfishness, resulting in a substantial increase in group competition rates, which can escalate up to 52.83 %. Moreover, increasing the help probability effectively suppresses the emergence of pathological selfishness and fosters cooperative behavior among pedestrians until 0.8. Notably, enhancing the level of social identity within the group facilitates the transition from pathological selfishness to adaptive selfishness, thereby effectively reducing competition rates. The influence of selfish psychology leads to an inequitable use of exits during evacuation. The crowding and competitive actions of pathologically selfish evacuees at exits can obstruct evacuation. This work elucidates the transmission mechanism of evacuation selfishness and could help disaster management.