Agent-based Modelling of Social Emotional Decision Making in Emergency Situations

Social decision making under stressful circumstances may involve strong emotions and contagion from others. Recent developments in Social Neuroscience have revealed neural mechanisms by which social contagion of cognitive and emotional states can be realised. In this paper, based on these mechanisms, an agent-based computational model is proposed. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how the proposed cognitive model can be transformed into an equivalent behavioural model without any cognitive states. As an application of the model, a computational analysis was performed of patterns in crowd behaviour, in particular by agent-based simulation of a real-life incident that took place on May 4, 2010 in Amsterdam. The results of the model analysis show the inclusion of contagion of belief, emotion, and intention states of agents results in better reproduction of the incident than non-inclusion. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013