The Challenges of Predicting Mob Behavior at Political Rallies, IEEE Spectrum, 29th Nov. 2018
▻https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/predicting-mob-behavior-at-political-rallies
A new model attempts to simulate social contagion at political gatherings
In a recent study in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, Mingliang Xu and colleagues at Zhengzhou University developed a model that brings us one step closer to predicting social contagion that occurs at political rallies.
“Group conflicts are gradually becoming a more severe potential threat to public safety, especially for people with different political beliefs. So we decided to model social contagion under political rally circumstances,” explains Xu, whose team received funding for the research through China’s National Key R&D Program.
[…]
A major, outstanding limitation of the model now is that it cannot capture the true personality of people present at a real-life rally. And different political groups attract people with different personality types. Wu says, “In the future, we plan to improve the accuracy of initial parameters by using some specialized data measurement or data learning methods, such as wearable devices.”
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Crowd Behavior Evolution With Emotional Contagion in Political Rallies - IEEE Journals & Magazine
▻https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8536474
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a novel crowd behavior evolution method with emotional contagion in political rallies. We first analyze the most representative political rally scenes in detail and model them into two kinds of abstract scenario. Furthermore, the `extroversion'' and `empathy’’ factors from the OCEAN model are chosen to describe the most important individual personalities in such scenarios. Based on this, an improved emotional contagion model is proposed by combining the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model and individual personality under different political viewpoints. Finally, the crowd in a political rally is driven to move according to the new potential moving direction generated by emotional contagion and the original direction of the individual together. The experiments show that our method can intuitively demonstrate the emotional changes of those individuals with different political perspectives and reasonably simulate the crowd movement under the political rally scenes.