Towards a Cognitive Model of Crowd Behavior Based on Social Comparison Theory

Abstract

Models of crowd behavior facilitate analysis and prediction of human group behavior, where people are affected by each other’s presence. Unfortunately, existing models leave many open challenges. In particular, psychology models often of-fer only qualitative description, while computer science mod-els are often simplistic, and are not reusable from one sim-ulated phenomenon to the next. We propose a novel model of crowd behavior, based on Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory (SCT).We propose a concrete algorithmic framework for SCT, and evaluate its implementation in several crowd behavior scenarios. Results from task measures and human judges evaluation shows that the SCT model produces im-proved results compared to base models from the literature.