In a crossroads during rush hour, you drive your way through the oncoming crowd, and your eyes wander over the faces in front of you. Finding this way can feel like something you do alone. But scientists studying the movements of crowds have found that a simple journey through a crowd is much more like a dance we perform with the people around us.
And so it may not be too much of a surprise to learn that someone staring at a phone, lost in a private world while walking, is really dealing with the atmosphere, according to a study published in the journal Wednesday Science Advances has been published.
People use different visual cues to predict where other members of a crowd will go next, said Hisashi Murakami, a professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology and author of the new article. He was curious what would happen if attention to these details were disrupted, which is why he and his colleagues filmed two groups of students in a series of outdoor experiments at a walking distance of about 30 meters in a series of outdoor experiments.
The groups walked towards each other at a normal pace. When the groups meet, the students intuitively perform a maneuver familiar to those studying crowds: they have formed lanes. When a person in front of one group finds a way through the oncoming group, others fall in behind that person and create different ribbons of walkers walking past each other. It was effortless and almost instantaneous.
The researchers asked three of the students to perform a task on their phones while walking – simple single-digit addition, not too burdensome, but enough to keep their gaze down instead of forward.
When the students were placed at the back of their group, the distraction had no effect on how the groups moved past each other. But when the derivative walkers were at the front of the pack, there was a dramatic slowdown in the running group’s entire pace. It also took longer before clear lanes formed.
Subtracted people also did not move smoothly. They took great strides sideways or eluded others in a way the researchers rarely saw if there was no distraction. The inattentive pedestrians in the experiment also induced the behavior in others; the people who did not look at their phones moved in a warmer way than back then when there were no phone callers. It seems that some people who do not pay full attention to navigation can change the behavior of the whole crowd of more than 50 people.
If one looks at the phone, it can have the effect because it deprives the information we are looking at, the researchers suggest. Where we watch as we move broadcasts, we are given details of where we intend to go next. Without it, it is more difficult for passers-by to avoid us gracefully. And just evading other people as we move, eyes away, rather than moving with opinion, makes us even more unpredictable.
As more and more people use smartphones and other devices that contribute to distracted walks, it may be necessary for architects and city planners who move with the crowd to take into account the changed behavior, the researchers say.
Dr. Murakami plans to detect people’s eye movements as they walk past each other. He hopes that these studies will show how our gaze helps us to navigate through crowds – what messages we convey about our next steps as we perform this daily ritual, even if we do not know it.