Field Theory in Practice

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present K. Lewin’s Field Theory in practice, applying it to evacuation simulations. The construction of the field is discussed from the scratch in order to define the psychological space of a social event. Then, we illustrate the interplay of the physical and the psychological aspects of a mathematical model of human behavior presenting and discussing evacuation simulations of one event. At first we simulate the physical situation and then we calculate an evacuation time applying an elementary microscopic model. An empirical plausibility control is presented. When we apply mathematical modeling or cybernetic methods to social sciences we are said to be careful. Nevertheless, a social event might be considered, on a natural way, as a set of time series, from the point of view of statistics. In this paper we restrict ourselves to introduce probabilities of random variables associated to the physical and the psychological space and define a measure for the evacuation simulation: The entropy of the event, merging the physical and the psychological spaces.