stampede psychology

January 21, 2012 8:03 AM

Is there any good research into how people behave in a stampede? You know, the classic fire in a theatre sort of stampede. I'm looking for academic articles, books, slate.com speculations, anything. Thanks!
posted by Pants! to Human Relations (12 answers total)

Pretty good article in the New Yorker recently on this very topic.
Excerpt:
"Crowds are a condition of urban life. On subways and sidewalks, in elevators and stores, we pass in and out of them in the course of a day, without pausing to consider by what mechanisms our brains guide us through so easily, rarely touching so much as a stranger’s shoulder."
posted by Lucubrator at 8:23 AM on January 21, 2012 [3 favorites]

It's not clear if you're asking about observations of stampeding humans, or physical modeling and simulations from a theoretical perspective. On the theoretical side, google scholar searches such as multi agent stampede or crowd simulation pop up tons of interesting studies which might be of interest. I would assume that some of these papers would cite observation data in building their model, but I haven't checked.
posted by bessel functions seem unnecessarily complicated at 8:39 AM on January 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

The wikipedia article on stampedes has a bunch of references. including this paper and this Slate article. There's a short video documentary on the Love Parade stampede (disturbing footage), and I swear there was a documentary about one of the early 20th century nightclub fires, but I can't find it.
posted by desjardins at 8:41 AM on January 21, 2012

A relevant term I've seen used in academia is "emergency egress". Here's a google scholar search on that term.
posted by noahpoah at 8:55 AM on January 21, 2012

Oops. HERE's a google scholar search on that term.
posted by noahpoah at 8:55 AM on January 21, 2012

Some useful Google Scholar searches:

stampede AND crowd

building evacuation

(I also did similar searches in a general academic database and found lots more good stuff.)

Or how about this lovely-sounding book: Don't Panic: the Psychology of Emergency Egress and Ingress
posted by mskyle at 9:00 AM on January 21, 2012

Amanda Ripley's book touches on this subject several times.
posted by SillyShepherd at 9:06 AM on January 21, 2012

And as a fun counterpoint, swarm intelligence and MASSIVE.
posted by likeso at 11:39 AM on January 21, 2012

The first couple hundred pages of Crowds and Power ares about this subject. While the book did win a Nobel prize, it is definitely speculation and not research.
posted by Balna Watya at 12:23 PM on January 21, 2012

If you're looking for anecdata on crowd reactions to fires in particular as well as scholarly research, I recommend The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan, Triangle by David von Drehle, and Fire in the Grove by John C. Esposito. Each book is about a historically famous/significant fire, and each includes scenes of general crowd reaction and descriptions of what specific people did and how they escaped (or didn't).

If you're looking for "pure stampede" accounts, you may want to avoid fire events. The movement of the fire and the smoke/gases has an enormous effect on what people are able to do that it would definitely skew any kind of "pure" response.
posted by epj at 5:28 PM on January 21, 2012

Completely coincidentally (and I was searching for something wholly unrelated at the time, to boot), I came across the site Safer Crowds last night.
posted by dhartung at 9:43 AM on January 22, 2012

It's been a while since I've read it, but Amanda Ripley's book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why deals with this.

Also been a while, but Lawrence Gonzales's book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why may also touch on it.
posted by Lexica at 6:46 PM on January 22, 2012