Video of Midwinter Meeting escalator phenomenon

This morning I captured on video a strange phenomenon I've been seeing all weekend during the 2012 Midwinter Meeting in Chicago, which I've appropriately dubbed the "escalator phenomenon." I first mentioned the behavior in a post about McCormick Place's very tall escalators yesterday.

What's been happening is this: Most of the escalators I've seen at McCormick Place come in groups of three, often with two adjacent escalators rising to the next floor and one descending. What's interesting is almost any time there's a crowd using the escalators -- and during the Midwinter Meeting there's almost always a crowd -- people going up tend to gravitate almost exclusively to the outside elevator going up, leaving the center one empty.

The result of this behavior is that the one escalator often winds up quite literally shoulder to shoulder, packed with people from the top to the bottom, while the other remains at times entirely empty, leaving just the occasional person or two who, as I wrote in my previous post, "brave the empty one solo."

I'm sure there's some "official" psychological term for this crowding behavior, but I don't know what it is. If you care to comment feel free to send me an email at midwintermeeting (at) gmail.com. And make sure to watch the video, as it shows exactly the behavior I'm talking about.