Walk the Line: The role of gender and culture on the movement patterns of pedestrians based on a multicultural study

Experimental work has opened new avenues for studying crowd behavior under well-controlled conditions with desirable levels of measurement accuracy. However, unlike many other areas of behavioral science, little attention has been paid to how reproducible and transferable crowd phenomena are between different populations. As such, there is only limited knowledge about how universal and generalizable experimental observations on crowd behavior are. This research explores how gender and culture impact pedestrian dynamics in single-file movement, a topic previously studied in isolation through disjointed and varied experiments. Here, for the first time, and as an attempt to investigate external validity and generalizability across cultures, we conduct the same experiment in five different countries. Each experiment examines the effects of varying gender compositions on single-file pedestrian movement. We observed consistent effects of different gender compositions on pedestrian movement across countries, with no significant deviations in the fundamental diagrams, especially in the bounded regime. Although there was some variability in acceleration behavior across countries. Interaction levels, clustering behavior, and pedestrian spacing patterns remained consistent between different gender compositions and countries. These results suggest that, while the behavior of collective motion varies by culture and gender composition, most aspects of pedestrian movement exhibit universal traits. Understanding these variations and commonalities can allow for better infrastructure design and planning tailored to the population of interest.