Social comparison in crowds

Abstract

Modeling crowd behavior is an important challenge for cognitive modelers. We propose a novel model of crowd behavior, based on Festinger's Social Comparison Theory, a social psychology theory known and expanded since the early 1950's. We propose a concrete framework for SCT, and evaluate its implementations in several crowd behavior scenarios. Results from task measures and human judges evaluation shows that the SCT model produces improved results compared to base models from the literature.