An experimental study of the “faster-is-slower” effect using mice under panic

A number of crowd accidents in last decades have attracted the interests of scientists in the study of self-organized behavior of crowd under extreme conditions. The faster-is-slower effect is one of the most referenced behaviors in pedestrian dynamics. However, this behavior has not been experimentally verified yet. A series of experiments with mice under panic were conducted in a bi-dimensional space. The mice were trained to be familiar with the way of escape. A varying number of joss sticks were used to produce different levels of stimulus to drive the mice to escape. The evacuation process was video-recorded for further analysis. The experiment found that the escape times significantly increased with the levels of stimulus due to the stronger competition of selfish mice in panic condition. The faster-is-slower effect was experimentally verified. The probability distributions of time intervals showed a power law and the burst sizes exhibited an exponential behavior.