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A ubiquitous type of collective behavior and decision-making is the coordinated motion of bird flocks, fish schools, and human crowds. Collective decisions to move in the same direction, turn right or left, or split into subgroups arise in a self-organized fashion from local interactions between individuals without central plans or designated leaders. Strikingly similar phenomena of consensus (collective motion), clustering (subgroup formation), and bipolarization (splitting into extreme groups) are also observed in opinion formation. As we developed models of crowd dynamics and analyzed crowd networks, we found ourselves going down the same path as models of opinion dynamics in social networks. In this article, we draw out the parallels between human crowds and social networks. We show that models of crowd dynamics and opinion dynamics have a similar mathematical form and generate analogous phenomena in multiagent simulations. We suggest that they can be unified by a common collective dynamics, which may be extended to other psychological collectives. Models of collective dynamics thus offer a means to account for collective behavior and collective decisions without appealing to a priori mental structures.
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A Hierarchical Decision-making Process in Social Networks for Disaster Management
The social media have been increasingly used for disaster management (DM) via providing real time data on a broad scale. For example, some smartphone applications (e.g. Disaster Alert and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) App) can be used to increase the efficiency of prepositioning supplies and to enhance the effectiveness of disaster relief efforts. To maximize utilities of these apps, it is imperative to have robust human behavior models in social networks with detailed expressions of individual decision-making processes and of the interactions among people. In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical human behavior model by associating extended Decision Field Theory (e-DFT) with the opinion formation and innovation diffusion models. Particularly, its expressiveness and validity are addressed in three ways. First, we estimate individual’s choice patterns in social networks by deriving people’s asymptotic choice probabilities within e-DFT. Second, by analyzing opinion formation models and innovation diffusion models in different types of social networks, the effects of neighbor’s opinions on people and their interactions are demonstrated. Finally, an agent-based simulation is used to trace agents’ dynamic behaviors in different scenarios. The simulated results reveal that the proposed models can be used to establish better disaster management strategies in natural disasters.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1662865
- PAR ID:
- 10112253
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IISE Annual Conference and Expo 2018
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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