Crowd Behaviour

Question 1

What is a crowd?:

Answer 1

• Groups in which:
  
  • People are face-to-face
  • There is no formal means of collective decision-making (unlike an army, for example)
  • Situation may involve some novelty
  • Act as one

Question 2

What is a crowd 2?:

Answer 2

· Not shopping crowds
· Music and sports event crowds
· Mass religious events
· Protests, riots

Question 3

Three theories of crowd behaviour:

Answer 3

a. Group mind
b. Group norms
c. Self-categorisation theory

Question 4

‘Group mind’:

Answer 4

• Earliest ‘scientific’ attempts to explain collective behaviour - late 19th century France
  
  • A response to the ‘social problem’ of the crowd
    1. Revolutions
    2. Urbanisation and anonymity
    3. Worker organisation
  • The crowd seen as a ‘threat to civilisation’

Question 5

‘Group mind’ theories:

Answer 5

• A primordial, collective unconscious, which guides sentiments and behaviour
  
  • Gustave Le Bon (1895):
  • Submerged in the crowd, the individual mind disappears, to be replaced by the ‘racial unconscious’
• Spread of common behaviour enhanced by ‘contagion’

Question 6

Problems of ‘group mind’:

Answer 6

1. Problems of assumption:
   
   • Le Bon links crowd psychology with mindless violence - cant easily explain non-violent crowds (e.g., Martin Luther King’s supporters)
     2. Problem of evidence:
   • Relied on secondary, selective and partial evidence
   • E.g., Taine’s account of bloody acts in the French Revolution
   • Took ‘crowd violence’ out of context
   • Self-defence depicted as meaningless outburst

Question 7

De-individuation theory:

Answer 7

· Modern version of ‘group mind’ - same idea that anonymity
- Loss of self
- Loss of self-control
· But lab experimental
· What’s the evidence
- Postmes and Spears (1998)
- Meta-analysis of 60 experiments
- Only weak evidence that societally anti-normative behaviours typically result from anonymity
- Little evidence for a ‘de-individuated’ state, or that reduced self-awareness predicts the behaviours
- Strong relation between anonymity and conformity to local group norms

Question 8

Group and norms:

Answer 8

· Asch (1952):
- An element takes its meaning from its place in the whole
- Individual behaviour is explicable in terms of group membership
· Sherif (1936):
- A group’s ‘code, standards, or rules’
- Group norms are produced within the group, then internalised by individuals and used as a frame of reference to define social reality and act.

Question 9

Turner and Killian’s (1957) emergent norm theory:

Answer 9

1. An ‘extraordinary [novel] situation’ or precipitating incident
   
   2. = a break from normal life and everyday norms
   3. Interaction - people cast around for a definition of the situation and a guide to conduct
   4. Eventually a norm emerges
   5. The norm allows behaviour to become collective/shared

Question 10

Sherif’s (1936) ‘autokinetic effect’ experiment:

Answer 10

• ‘Moving light’ in darkened room (uncertainty)
  
  • Estimate the amount of movement individually
  • Group (public) interaction and estimate of movement
  • Convergence of individual judgements to group median
  • Changed individual estimate indicated that group estimate had been internalised

Question 11

Group norms - key ideas:

Answer 11

1. Rejecting the assumptions of mindless ‘mob mentality’ as basis for collective behaviour
   
   2. Norms as shared, internalised representations in each individual enables collective behaviour
   3. Norms come about through interpersonal interaction - talking to each other

Question 12

Is interpersonal interaction actually necessary for collective behaviour?:

Answer 12

· The Minimal Group Paradigm (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament,1971)
· Research question: What are the minimal conditions for intergroup behaviour?
· Results:
- The boys favoured their ingroup over the outgroup in the allocation of points (i.e. group behaviour), even though:
i) they didn’t know any of their fellow ingroup members
ii) the division into ingroup and outgroup was arbitrary
iii) there was no interpersonal interaction among ingroup members

Question 13

John C. Turner (1982) - a new hypothesis:

Answer 13

· Not ‘interpersonal interaction’, but social identity is the cognitive mechanism which makes group behaviour possible’ (Turner, 1982, p. 21)
· Self-categorization theory (‘self-cat’) explains the process whereby social identities shape collective behaviour

Question 14

Self-categorisation theory - key principles 1:

Answer 14

· Cognitive representations of self take the form of self-categories (grouping of self and other stimuli in relation to others)
· Social identities consist of self-categories.

Question 15

Self-categorisation theory - key principles 2:

Answer 15

· Self-categories exist at different levels of abstraction
· From exclusive to inclusive

Question 16

Self-categorisation theory - key principles 3:

Answer 16

· Salience of self-categories (identities) operates through fit x perceiver readiness
· Fit =
1. Comparative fit (‘meta-contrast’):
- differences within a group are less than the difference between the group and another group (or outside thing)
2. Normative fit: do group members act the way we’d expect – e.g., academics being scholarly?
· ‘Perceiver readiness’ variables = Memory, knowledge, commitment…

Question 17

London bombings, July 7th 2005:

Answer 17

· Drury, Cocking, & Reicher, 2009
· Four bombs
· 56 people died
· 700+ injuries
· Commuters
· Interviews with survivors

Question 18

Before the bomb:

Answer 18

Meta-contrast - ‘me’ in relation to other individuals

Question 19

After the bomb:

Answer 19

Meta-contrast - ‘us’ in relation to the bomb blast

Question 20

Self-categorisation theory - key principles 4:

Answer 20

· Social influence operates through shared self-categorization:
- We follow others’ behaviour to the extent that they are ingroup members
- The most influential are those that best embody the category (‘us’) relative to a salient outgroup (‘them’/other) – ‘prototypes’

Question 21

How is collective behaviour possible?:

Answer 21

· ‘Social identity is the cognitive mechanism…’ (Turner, 1982, p. 21)
· Collective behaviour is a function of people self-stereotyping = applying shared social category characteristics (including the group norms) to themselves
· Self-stereotyping is also known as ‘depersonalization’ (NOT to be confused with ‘de-individuation’)

Question 22

The St Pauls riot:

Answer 22

· The first of the wave of urban riots of the 1980s.
· The event which was suggested to have set it off was a police raid on a local café in the St Pauls district of Bristol
· The café had symbolic and practical importance to the local community
· There were several incidents of violence between police and a crowd outside the café,

Question 23

The St Pauls riot 2:

Answer 23

· Police were forced to flee.
· Some police were trapped in the cafe
· Police returned with reinforcements
· More and more people joined in attacking them
· Police vehicle set alight
· Running battles
· Eventually, the police had to leave the area entirely, ‘in disarray’.

Question 24

The St Pauls riot - second phase:

Answer 24

· After the police had left
· The crowd took charge of traffic control, stopping suspected police cars entering the area.
- Certain property came under attack and there was some looting.

Question 25

The St Pauls riot - damage:

Answer 25

· Of 60 police, 22 were injured, 27 minor injuries
· 21 police vehicles damaged

Question 26

Methods (Reicher, 1984, 1987):

Answer 26

· Sources:
- Interviews
- Media sources
- Witnesses
- Pictures
1. Triangulation to create a consensual account of what happened
2. Thematic analysis of participants’ perceptions to explain what happened

Question 27

Participants in the riot shared a social identity:

Answer 27

• ‘Members of the St Pauls community’.
  
  • Defined in terms of:
    1. Locality
    2. Desire for freedom’
    3. An antagonistic relationship with police

Question 28

Crowd behaviour in the riot was limited and patterned in line with this identity

Question 29

Limits to behaviour - geographical limits:

Answer 29

• The rioting remained within St Pauls
  
  • The crowd directed traffic flow, controlling entry to the area

Question 30

Limits to behaviour - targets of attack:

Answer 30

• People:
  
  • Only the police
  • Passers by moved safely through the crowd
  • Fire service were helped in phase 1

Question 31

Targets of attack:

Answer 31

· Property:
- Banks, the benefits office, the rent office and the post office were attacked:
- ‘these were not just symbols but the very agents of their continued powerlessness’
- Expensive shops owned by ‘outsiders’ and chain-stores were looted
- Disapproval when someone threw a missile at a bus
- Homes and local shops were actively protected

Question 32

Limits to behaviour - who got involved?:

Answer 32

· Only those who shared the identity
- participated
- were influenced by other crowd participants
· The most influential were those seen by crowd members as prototypical of the St Pauls crowd – older Rastafarians

Question 33

Crowd behaviour in the St Pauls riot - group mind?:

Answer 33

· Le Bon would predict indiscriminate (mindless) violence and ‘contagious’ influence
- But there were clear limits to behaviour
- Only certain behaviours spread through the crowd
- Only certain people were influenced or influential

Question 34

Crowd behaviour in the St Pauls riot - group norms?:

Answer 34

· Yes, behaviour was normatively structured.
· But extended interaction wasn’t necessary: group norms (attacking the police) arose quickly
· New ‘situational’ norms were constrained by the superordinate social category definition
· What do I do as a member of St Pauls in this context?

Question 35

Crowd behaviour in the St Pauls riot - Social identity model:

Answer 35

· Rioters shared the group norm of getting the police out of St Pauls, based on their shared social identity
· This norm came from self-stereotyping (‘depersonalization’): The shift from personal identity (‘me’) to shared social identity (‘us - member of St Pauls’ community’)
- Evidence: nature of targets reflected features of shared social identity