Crowd Behaviour Flashcards
What is a crowd?
People are face-to-face -> Situation may involve some novelty -> There is no formal means of collective decision-making (unlike an army, for example) -> Act as one
What is group mind?
Earliest ‘scientific’ attempts to explain crowd behaviour: late 19th century France -> A response to the ‘social problem’ of the crowd -> Revolutions -> Urbanization and aanonymity -> Worker organization -> The crowd seen as a ‘threat to civilization’.
Group mind theories
A primordial, collective unconscious, which guides sentiments and behaviour -> Gustave le bon (1985) submerged in the crowd, the individual mind disappears, to be replaced by the ‘racial conscious’ -> spread of common behaviour enhanced by contagion.
Problems of group minds
Problems of assumption -> Le Bon links crowd psychology with mindless violence - Can’t easily explain non-violent crowds (e.g., Martin Luther King’s supporters) -> 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.
De-individuation theory
De-individuation theory -> modern version of group mind – same idea that anonymity -> loss of self, loss of self-control, but lab experiment. What’s the evidence? -> Postmes & 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
Groups and norms
Gestalt approach/interactionism. Asch, 1952 -> An element takes its meaning from its place in the whole -> Individual behaviour is explicable in terms of group membership. Sherif (1936) -> Norms: A group’s ‘code, standards, or rules’ (Sherif, 1961) -> Norms are produced within the group, then internalized by individuals and used as a frame of reference to define social reality and act.
emergent norm theory
An ‘extraordinary [novel] situation’ or precipitating incident -> A break from normal life and everyday norms. Interaction: People cast around for a definition of the situation and a guide to conduct. Eventually a norm emerges. The norm allows behaviour to become collective.
Sherif’s 1936 autokinetic effect experiment
‘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 internalized.
Gestalt and group norms -> key ideas
Rejecting the assumption of mindless ‘mob mentality’ as basis for collective behaviour -> Norms as shared, internalized representations in each individual enables collective behaviour -> Norms come about through interpersonal interaction – talking to each other.
Is interpersonal interaction necessary for collective behavior
The minimal group paradigm -> What are the minimal conditions for intergroup behaviour? Results: The boys favoured their ingroup over the outgroup in the allocation of points (i.e. acted in a group way), even though: they didn’t know any of their fellow ingroup members, the division into ingroup and outgroup was arbitrary, there was no interpersonal interaction among ingroup members
John C turner (1982) -> Not ‘interpersonal interaction’, but social identity is the cognitive mechanism which makes group behaviour possible’. Self-categorization theory (‘self-cat’) explains the process whereby social identities shape collective behaviour.
Self-categorization
Cognitive representations of self-take the form of self-categories (grouping of self with other stimuli in relation to others) -> Social identities consist of self-categories -> Self-categories exist at different levels of abstraction from exclusive to inclusive -> Salience of self-categories (identities) operates through fit x perceiver readiness -> Fit = Comparative fit (‘meta-contrast’) -> differences within a group are less than the difference between the group and another group (or outside thing) -> Normative fit: do group members act the way we’d expect – e.g., academics being scholarly? -> ‘Perceiver readiness’ variables = Memory, knowledge, commitment.
Comparative fit at london bombings
Four bombs, 56 people died, 700+ injuries, Commuters, Interviews with survivors. Meta-contrast -> ‘ME’ in relation to other individuals -> meta-contrast -> ‘us’ in relation to the bomb blast. They felt more of a relationship, unity with the public after the bomb happened.
Self-categorization key principles
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.
How is collective behaviour possible?
Social identity is the cognitive mechanism…’ (Turner, 1982, p. 21) -> Collective behaviour is a function of people self-stereotyping = applying shared social category charaStcteristics (including the group norms) to themselves -> Self-stereotyping is also known as ‘depersonalization’ (NOT to be confused with ‘de-individuation’)
St paul’s riot
Example -> example of riot -> st Paul’s riot -> 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 Paul’s 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, Police were forced to flee, Some police were trapped in the café, 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’. Of 60 police, 22 were injured, 27 minor injuries, 21 police vehicles damaged.
