Human collective behavior can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disordered gas-like state called a mosh pit and an ordered vortex-like state called a circle pit. Both phenomena are reproduced in flocking simulations demonstrating that human collective behavior is consistent with the predictions of simplified models.
Like most observers of concerts and mosh pits, Jesse L. Silverberg, Matthew Bierbaum, James P. Sethna, and Itai Cohen have combined the decibel levels, the beats per minute, the crowd capacity, the (potential intoxication) and lighting to form a comprehensive idea behind why people mosh. They even compared a mosh pit to other forms of collision that they see daily in science experiments, citing "Qualitatively, this phenomenon resembles the kinetics of gaseous particles, even though moshers are self-propelled agents that experience dissipative collisions."
Seems pretty simple right? Well, here is the formula they created, along with a little bit of a breakdown for the equation:
You can read the rest of the publication (in PDF format) here. Want to see a simulation of a moshpit and it's outcome? Click here to check it out!
makes total sense to me...that an having RATM playing!
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