Are crowds necessarily stupid?

By: Caroline Lachowsky

Are crowds necessarily stupid? What do schools of fish or grains of sand teach us about our crowd movements, our traffic jams? How to develop a collective and distant intelligence?

Publicity

Let us ask ourselves about the crowd and the behavior of the crowds, at a time when gatherings are prohibited and social distancing is essential: it is all the more relevant to understand how to avoid crowds, traffic jams and other crowd movements. Hence the interest in studying them, on all scales and in all fields ... these crowds, which are not all blind, destructive and unleashed, but where surprising collective intelligence is also deployed like those schools of fish, flocks of birds or even sand dunes ... But what connection can there be between the flow of fluids and a traffic jam?

With Mehdi Moussaïd , researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. Since 2007, he has been studying crowd behavior. This concerns for example the collective movement of pedestrians in shopping streets, around stadiums or at the end of a concert. A large part of his studies also concern panic movements and the dangerous jostling that occurs when the crowd is too dense. One of the most studied by “foulologists” is the annual Mecca pilgrimage. His work Fouloscopie was published by Humensciences. He will also talk about social contagion on the internet in the era of the coronavirus and the fears linked to the crowd and gatherings ...

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