Collective Behaviour in Street Crossings
A collective behaviour situation encountered by everyone near-daily is crossing the street, whether at intersections with or without traffic signals. Without traffic signals, the collective behaviour is obvious: if a group is attempting to cross, as soon as one person crosses every other person immediately assesses the cost-benefit of crossing and the individual knowledge of the one who crossed. With traffic signals, although we are supposed to and for the most part only cross when the signal tells us to, if a person crosses during a red light, the same thought processes occur.
I think it is quite safe to say that the objective benefit from saving a few seconds is usually not worth the increased risk of an accident when crossing at a red light, yet this collective behaviour is not at all rare. The same conclusion was reached by Faria et. al., who found that at any time an individual whose neighbour had just begun crossing was 1.5 to 2.5 times more likely to begin crossing themselves, and argued that pedestrians should always use nonsocial information (such as the distances and speeds of cars) rather than social information (other individuals crossing) when deciding when to cross. They hypothesize that the reason why some individuals will let social information override nonsocial information is that the social information causes a “maladaptive information cascade” throughout the group, where an individual believes that the group has better information than themselves, and chooses to cross against their better conscience.
Interestingly, collective behaviour when crossing the street appears to differ from culture to culture. A 2017 study by Marie Pelé et. al. found that “French pedestrians cross against the lights much more often (41.9%) than Japanese ones (2.1%)”, but that stronger conformism occurred in Japan. They hypothesize that this is because of Japan’s collectivist nature (which emphasizes family and working towards group goals rather than individual goals), greater emphasis on rule-following, and greater awareness of the opinions of others. Therefore, if an individual crosses against a light in Japan, their neighbours will be more likely to trust their social information, and follow.
Sources:
https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/21/6/1236/332865?login=true#85853350
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.160739