Abstract
When people who strongly identify with different competitive groups meet, this can result in negative affect and aggression. A significant body of work has applied agent-based modelling to study the spread of emotions in the crowds, called emotion contagion. Although some of these models consider the effect of pre-existing social relationships, this is mostly limited to dyadic relationships (e.g. friends) or clearly defined roles (e.g. police-civilian). In the present study we propose an extension of the agent-based model DECADE, that combines emotion contagion with continuous variation in how much an agent identifies with a group. We explore the spread of aggression among football supporters in the form of pitch invasions, in which spectators enter the playing field illegally. We test management strategies that alter the supporter composition on the stands with regards to placement (separating by teams and/or fanaticism) and composition (stadium bans, limiting the promotion of identification). The results show that measures that decrease the number of fanatics, or that promote a balanced mix regarding group identification, decrease collective aggression. Finally, the model is evaluated against recent footage and descriptions of a real pitch invasion. The simulations resembled the real incident in several behavioural patterns, but not all. We conclude that further research is required to determine which individual traits and processes are essential in simulating collective aggression among competitive groups, to come to a model that can be employed in society.
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Acknowledgements
This work is part of the research programme Innovational Research Incentives Scheme Vidi SSH 2017 with project number 016.Vidi.185.178, which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
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van Haeringen, E., Liistro, G., Gerritsen, C. (2022). An Agent-Based Model of Emotion Contagion and Group Identification: A Case Study in the Field of Football Supporters. In: Dignum, F., Mathieu, P., Corchado, J.M., De La Prieta, F. (eds) Advances in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complex Systems Simulation. The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13616. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18192-4_33
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