Modeling the dynamical process of behavioral contagion in human crowds during evacuation

Abstract

Behavioral contagion, the process by which individuals adopt behaviors from neighbors, plays a critical role in crowd evacuations by shaping collective decision-making and movement patterns. Despite its observable and tractable nature compared to emotional contagion, however, behavioral contagion remains underexplored in crowd models, with its propagation mechanisms and effects on evacuation dynamics yet to be systematically explored. To address these gaps, we propose a behavioral contagion-based social force model (BC-SFM) that explicitly couples contagion mechanisms with movement behaviors. Numerical simulations show that BC-SFM outperforms the classical SFM by enabling faster and more synchronized changes in escape behaviors, highlighting the performance superiority of our model in characterizing behavioral contagion dynamics. The intensity and heterogeneity of interaction radius and response threshold jointly determine the spatial–temporal dynamics of behavioral contagion, with their effects also varying across different crowd densities. Moreover, four typical contagion mechanisms, shaped by distinct combinations of perceptual capacity and individual responsiveness, significantly affect evacuation dynamics, particularly in terms of efficiency and congestion. These findings demonstrate the pivotal impact of behavioral contagion on emergent evacuation outcomes, offering theoretical foundations for advancing predictive models and adaptive management strategies.