13. Crowd Behaviour I Flashcards
What is a crowd?
Groups in which…
1. People are f____-t____-f____
2. Situation may involve some n____
3. There is no f____ means of c____ d____-m____ (unlike an army, for example)
4. BUT people act a____ o____
- face-to-face
- novelty
- formal, collective decision-making
- as one
Three theories of crowd behaviour:
1. G____ m____
2. G____ n____
3. S____-c____ theory
- Group mind
- Group norms
- Self-categorisation
The earliest ‘scientific’ attempts to explain crowd behaviour were in later __th century F____. Crowd theories were a response to the ‘s____ p____’ of the crowd. The crowd was seen as a ‘t____ to c____’
19th century France
‘social problem’
‘threat to civilisation’
Group mind means a p____, c____ u____ which guides s____ and b____.
Gustave Le Bon (1895)
- S____ in the crowd, the individual mind d____, to be replaced by the ‘r____ u____’
- S____ of common behaviour takes place through ‘c____’
primordial, collective unconscious, sentiments, behaviour
- Submerged, disappears, racial unconscious
- Spread, contagion
Problems of ‘group mind’ explanations:
1. Problems of a____ - Le Bon links crowd psychology with m____ v____, can’t easily explain n____-v____ crowds
2. Problems of e____ - relied on s____, s____ and p____ evidence. Took ‘crowd v____’ out of c____
- assumption, mindless violence, non-violent (e.g. Martin Luther King’s supporters)
- evidence, secondary, selective, partial, violence, context (self-defence depicted as meaningless outburst)
The De-individuation theory is the modern version of ‘g____ m____’. It has the same idea that a____ leads to loss of s____ and loss of s____-c____
group mind
anonymity
self, self-control
Evidence for De-individuation theory:
- Postmes & Spears (1998) Meta-analysis of 60 experiments…
- Only weak evidence that s____ a____-n____ behaviours typically result from anonymity
- Little evidence for a ‘d____-i____’ state, or that reduced s____-a____ predicts the behaviours
- Strong relationship between anonymity and c____ to local g____ n____
- societally anti-normative
- de-individuated, self-awareness
- conformity, group norms
Groups and norms…
Gestalt approach/interactionism:
Asch (1952) - an element takes its meaning from its place in the w____. Individual behaviour is e____ in terms of group m____.
Sherif (1961) - norms are a group’s c____, s____ or r____. Norms are p____ within the group, then i____ by individuals and used as a frame of r____ to define social r____ and a____
whole, explicable, membership
code, standards, rules
produced, internalised, reference, reality, act
Sherif’s (1936) ‘autokinetic effect’ experiment:
- ‘Moving light’ in darkened room (u____)
- Estimate the amount of movement i____
- Group (public) i____ and estimate of movement
- Convergence of i____ j____ to group m____
- Changed i____ estimate indicated that g____ estimate had been i____
- uncertainty
- individually
- interaction
- individual judgements, median
- individual estimate, group, internalised
Turner and Killian’s (1957) emergent norm theory:
1. An ‘e____ [n____] s____’ or precipitating incident (e.g. a disaster) = a break from normal life and e____ n____
2. I____ - people ‘m____’ around for a definition of the situation and a g____ to c____
3. Eventually a n____ emerges
4. The shared norm allows behaviour to become c____
- extraordinary [novel] situation, everyday norms
- Interaction, mill, guide, conduct
- Norm
- Collective
Gestalt and group norms: key ideas
1. Rejecting the assumption of mindless ‘m____ m____’ as a basis for collective behaviour
2. Norms as s____, i____ r____ in each individual enables collective behaviour
3. Norms come about through i____ i____ - talking to each other
- ‘mob mentality’
- shared, internalised, representations
- interpersonal interaction
Is interpersonal interaction actually necessary for collective behaviour?
The Minimal Group Paradigm - research question = what are the minimal conditions for intergroup behaviour?
Results: boys favoured their in-group over outgroup in the a____ of p____ (i.e. acted in a group way), even though:
1. They didn’t k____ any of their fellow in-group members
2. The devision into in-group and outgroup was a____
3. There was no i____ i____ among in-group members
allocation of points
1. know
2. arbitrary (based on random choice)
interpersonal interaction
John C. Turner (1982) hypothesis:
Not ‘interpersonal interaction’, but s____ i____ is the c____ m____ which makes group behaviour possible. The Self-categorisation theory explains how s____ i____ s____ collective behaviour
social identity
cognitive mechanism
social identities shape
Key principles of the self cat theory:
1. Cognitive representations of self take the form of s____-c____ (g____ of self with other stimuli in relation to others). Social identities c____ of self-categories
- Self-categories exist at different levels of a____, from e____ to i____
- S____ of self-categories (identities) operates through f____ x p____ r____
- S____ i____ operates through shared self-categorisation - we follow others’ behaviour to the extent that they are i____ members. The most influential are those that best e____ the c____ (called p____) relative to a salient outgroup
- self-categories, grouping, consist
- abstraction, exclusive, inclusive
- Salience, fit x perceiver readiness
- social influence, in-group, embody, category, prototypes
Salience of self-categories (identities) operates through fit x perceiver readiness
Fit =
1. C____ fit = differences w____ a group are less than the difference b____ the group and a____ group
2. N____ fit = do group members act the way we’d e____
Perceiver readiness variables = m____, k____, c____…
- Comparative, within, between, another
- Normative, expect
memory, knowledge, commitment
Collective behaviour is a function of people s____-s____ = applying the c____ of a s____ social category to themselves
self-stereotyping, characteristics, salient
(Self-stereotyping is also known as ‘depersonalization’ (NOT to be confused with ‘de-individuation’))
Participants in the riot shared a social identity:
‘Members of the St Pauls community’.
Identity defined in terms of:
1. L____
2. D____ for ‘f____’
3. An a____ relationship with p____
Crowd behaviour in the riot was l____ and p____ in line with this identity
- Locality
- Desire, freedom
- Antagonistic, police
limited, patterned
