Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Economics and Political Science - Department of Social Science Computing

Crowd phenomenon is a complex human behavior that has been investigated in different disciplines. The mystery of crowd lies in the strange pattern in which people tend to behave when they are among a group than their typical pattern when they are in isolation. Revolutionary crowd, as a special crowd type, has not been fully examined in the literature. However, due to the recent and current turbulent sociopolitical global environment, it turns to be a hot research topic. The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of a set of internal and external factors on the crowd pattern and dynamics in an attempt to understand the conditions that lead to or prohibit the formation of revolutionary crowds. A complete framework for the research is developed. This includes identifying the factors influencing the crowd, describing the behavior and interaction of the individuals constituting the society, then developing a computer agent - based simulation testbed for testing a predefined set of experiments. Amongst several intuitive logical results, the proposed model shows a number of emergent behaviors including the insignificance of highly intensified media under unfavorable satisfaction levels, the failure of contagion theory in sustaining a revolution without supporting external media, and the positive influence of the number of acquaintances on maintaining an ignited revolution

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