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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: April 10, 2016

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REAL LIFE NEWS: SLOW DOWN TO ESCAPE FASTER

by Hazed

If you’re in a crowd of people who are all trying to escape a room through a narrow doorway, the natural thing to do is to push and shove and try to get out as fast as you can. But you’d do better to stop panicking and move slower.

Recent experiments using both humans and sheep show that if individuals try to move through a narrow opening fast, it takes longer for the group to get out.

The tests were carried out by Iker Zuriguel and his colleagues at the University of Navarra, Spain. They started experimenting with humans, and put 95 volunteers in a room then asked them to evacuate in three different ways; avoiding all physical contact between each other, allowing them to contact each other softly, and allowing gentle pushing. What they found was that the more competition there was between people, the slower the escape.

“People get stuck in the door,” says Zuriguel. “This can be dangerous.”

Then they turned their attention to sheep – hungry ones. “Sheep are useful,” says Zuriguel. “They are used to pushing each other just for food.”

Because sheep vary their speed depending on the temperature, moving more quickly on warm days than when it’s cold, the researchers could compare their speed moving through the doorway on warm and cool days. The individual sheep moved a lot faster on the warm days – but the group as a whole was slower getting out of the door.

A third experiment used glass beads which showed exactly the same effect.

The effect that these results demonstrate is what leads to tragedies such as the 2003 Station nightclub fire in the US, and the 1980 Hillsborough Stadium disaster in the UK.

All very interesting, but the trouble is that it’s all very well to know this, but when a crowd starts to panic, how can you persuade them not to push and shove?

Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22930552-200-dont-shove-sheep-and-humans-show-pushing-slows-evacuation/

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