Understanding Crowd Responses to Perceived Hostile Threats: An Innovative Multidisciplinary Approach

Anne Templeton; Maïka Telga; Enrico Ronchi; Fergus Neville; Stephen Reicher; John Drury

doi:10.17815/CD.2024.157

Authors

Anne Templeton Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5422-6297
Maïka Telga School of Psychology and Counselling, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6792-0093
Enrico Ronchi Division of Fire Safety Engineering, John Ericssons vag 1, Lund University, Lund, Sweden https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2789-6359
Fergus Neville School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7377-4507
Stephen Reicher School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3449-0082
John Drury School of Psychology, Pevensey Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7748-5128

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17815/CD.2024.157

Keywords:

Virtual reality, Crowd dynamics, Crowd psychology, Observation method

Abstract

People facing threat may evacuate, help others, share information, ignore the threat and the plight of others, or enact a combination of these behaviours. Accurate conceptual models of crowd behaviours must consider why and when these behaviours occur, as well as how people's responses may vary across different scenarios. Researchers have investigated crowd responses to threats using a variety of methods, such as interviews, observational analysis and virtual reality experiments. Each methodology offers benefits to understanding collective responses to threats, but each methodology also has limitations. Importantly, very little research has explored crowd responses in false alarm situations where crowd members misperceive that a threat exists. In this paper, we describe a new programme of work which combines approaches from safety engineering and crowd psychology to gain a thorough understanding of crowd behaviour in response to real and misperceived threats, and the processes underpinning the behaviour. We focus on how we identified and addressed the similarities and differences in our research questions, conceptual approaches to research, and methodological abilities. We demonstrate how our multidisciplinary approach provides a framework for combining diverse research methods that collectively build knowledge to create more accurate models of crowd responses to (mis)perceived threats.

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