Waiting Behavior and Arousal in Different Levels of Crowd Density: A Psychological Experiment with a “Tiny Box”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Crowd density, defined as persons per square meter, is a basic measuring unit for describing and analyzing crowd dynamics and for planning pedestrian infrastructure. However, little is known about the relationship between crowd density and psychological stress and well-being. This study uses an experimental approach to determine whether higher crowd densities result in higher levels of stress in participants. In this experiment, which was a case study at the university, participants (N = 29) wait in a wooden box of 1 m2 for three minutes. Two, four, six, or eight participants are present simultaneously in the box. It is varied whether participants are supposed to remain silent or to speak with each other. Stress is conceptualized as arousal and measured as skin conductance level/electrodermal activity (EDA). A questionnaire is administered after the experiment, and the positioning of participants in the box is videotaped. The results show that the correlation between crowd density and physiological arousal is more complex than expected. The specific social situation in the box appears to play a more important role than merely the number of people waiting there. Furthermore, our data indicate a temporal trend: participants seem to adapt to the crowd density in the box. Video data analysis reveals that participants choose their positioning and orientation in the box carefully, but that this social choreography works less smoothly in higher densities. This study shows promising results for using EDA as a measurement of arousal in the context of crowd research. However, the limitations of this method and the experiments conducted are also discussed in detail to further improve this approach.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".