Psychological insights

The aim of this chapter is to take another point of view in the modeling of the crowd. Namely, here we report some approaches focusing on pedestrians as individuals. Then it is of paramount importance to take into account the psychological aspects of the problem, distinguishing moving humans from “particles” or even from self-propelled agents (e.g., birds). Such psychological components show up both in the choice of walking strategies and preferences and in interaction rules with other pedestrians. The focus will be mainly on investigations addressing the behavior of the single pedestrian moving in an organized environment. Moreover, we will discuss some models proposed by works in different fields, not limited to psychology. However, the latter are more of qualitative nature, as opposed to mathematically advanced ones discussed in Chaps. 4 and 5. Then we will deal with experiments and measurements. In particular we will discuss how the experimental setting influences results because of expected psychological bias. Also a view on the most used measurement tools is included, since this may also affect the perception of experiment participants. Finally, we will compare some experimental setting, showing how sensitive to them measurements can be.