First Steps Towards a Social Comparison Model of Crowds

Modeling crowd behavior is an important challenge for cognitive modelers. Unfortunately, existing computational models are typically not tied to cognitive science theories, and are rarely evaluated against human crowd data. We investigate a general cognitive model of crowd behavior, based on Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory (SCT). We evaluate the SCT model on general pedestrian movement, and validate the model against human pedestrian behavior. The results show that SCT generates behavior more in-tune with human crowd behavior then existing non-cognitive models. Moreover, we examine the impact of the different SCT model components on the generated pedestrian behavior.