The relationship between crowding and intention of visiting the place under the condition of "preferred number of people"

Abstract

It is important to cope with crowding, which is an unavoidable phenomenon in city life. The purpose of this paper is to consider the relationship between "crowding", and "intention of visiting the place" depicting various densities of people. Photographs contained different locations of a train station, a movie theater, and a large-scale retail store were used as stimuli. The results of the experiment indicated that as the number of people in photographs increased, subjects felt crowded regardless of the specific locations. In addition, each subject had own preference for the number of people in each place; under this condition, the highest intention of visiting there was achieved. But for specific locations of a train station, such as a ticket vending machine, as the number of depicted people increased, the intention of visiting there decreased. And in all places, male subjects were more affected by crowding than female subjects in estimating the intention of visiting there.