ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2024
Human Crowds as Social Networks: Collective Dynamics of Consensus and Polarization.
Article in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Others Like Me: How Issue-Position Groups Distort the Function of Morality by Manufacturing Consensus.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Unraveling human crowd dynamics through the foot tracking of pedestrians.Science advances · 2025Article
- Lane formation in criss-crossing crowds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Modelling human navigation and decision dynamics in a first-person herding task.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Exploring the dynamics of intentional sensorimotor desynchronization using phasing performance in music.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A ubiquitous type of collective behavior and decision-making is the coordinated motion of bird flocks, fish schools, and human crowds. Collective decisions to move in the same direction, turn right or left, or split into subgroups arise in a self-organized fashion from local interactions between individuals without central plans or designated leaders. Strikingly similar phenomena of consensus (collective motion), clustering (subgroup formation), and bipolarization (splitting into extreme groups) are also observed in opinion formation. As we developed models of crowd dynamics and analyzed crowd networks, we found ourselves going down the same path as models of opinion dynamics in social networks. In this article, we draw out the parallels between human crowds and social networks. We show that models of crowd dynamics and opinion dynamics have a similar mathematical form and generate analogous phenomena in multiagent simulations. We suggest that they can be unified by a common collective dynamics, which may be extended to other psychological collectives. Models of collective dynamics thus offer a means to account for collective behavior and collective decisions without appealing to a priori mental structures.
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Registered trials
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