SRCrowd: Individual and collective agency in socially-responsible nudging of crowds
The SRCrowd project was formed in 2021 with the purpose of adding an additional layer of philosophy, ethics, and psychology over the earlier HTCrowd project.
HTCrowd is focused on developing a high-tech platform for human crowds monitoring, modeling and nudging. SRCrowd, on the other hand, enhances it by focusing on the conceptual, philosophical, ethical and psychological perspectives of crowd monitoring, modeling and nudging.
Consequently, SRCrowd is also split in three phases:
- observation (monitoring)
- modeling
- nudging.
This project supports the HTCrowd project to provide a train station crowd management that maximises safety, using privacy-respectful sensing, while unlocking socially responsible crowd nudging.
Additionally, as can be inferred from the full title, SRCrowd deals in perspectives of individual versus collective agency, intentionality, behaviour and responsibility. It does this by exploring the tension between individualistic and collectivist values and approaches, the methods used to study them, and possible ways of reconciliation.
The Philosophy & Ethics subgroup is focused on discovering ethically acceptable directions to nudge train station crowds and to increase social responsibility of / in these crowds. The psychology subgroup is focused on discovering how this nudging can be performed optimally (i.e., effectively and acceptably) taking individual and crowd attributes into account.