Crowds and Identities: John Drury’s Research Group

The crowd psychology of the annual Hajj

The annual Hajj

The annual Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca involves over two million people. This project aims to build a cognitive model for the behavioral factors that affect the Hajj crowd's movement during different stages of Hajj. A cognitive model will add psychological validity to future Hajj crowds computer models by providing behavioural factors shown to be important.

Project justification
  • Raising crowd management efficiency in light of the plan to increase the number of Hajj and Umrah visitors in some sacred sites with limited capacity.
  • Non-compliance with the instructions creates unsafe crowds leading to not using the available capacity.
  • Large cultural diversity makes it challenging to communicate and predict crowd behavior. 

 

Poster of the Hajj project.