Social dynamics in emergency evacuations: Disentangling crowd's attraction and repulsion effects

In brief, our finding disentangles the conditions under which individuals are more likely to show mass behaviour from the situations where they are more likely to break from the herd. It identifies two factors that moderate the perception of social interactions, “crowds' jam/movement status” and “environmental setup”. Our results particularly challenge the taxonomy of attraction-repulsion social interaction forces defined purely based on the distance of the individual to the surrounding crowd, by showing that crowds could be in far distance and yet be perceived as repulsion effect, or they could be in close distance and yet act as attraction effect.