Lecture 01 Flashcards
What is another term for crowd behaviour?
Collective behaviour
Can collective behaviour be explained via meta-theories?
Give 3 examples of different meta-theories
No
- Personality/individual differences
- Social cognitions/self interest
- Social organisation/sturctures
What type of explanation for behaviour (societal or intra-individual) is self interest?
What about social organisation?
Intra-individual
Societal
Who is LeBon? Describe his work
- He researched crowd behaviours and wrote a book on it. His explanations were very popular at the time.
- He grew up in the French revolution and therefore had a lot of experience of crowd events.
- He said that crowds reduce civilised behaviour and increase primitive instincts. He also believed that when in a crowd, one becomes homogenous and uniformed. There is a collective mind as conscious personality vanishes and one becomes more impulsive
- This can be explained via 3 psychological mechanisms.
- This idea got into the wrong hands as it was so fertile, for example it helped fuel Hitler’s control over a crowd.
What are three psychological mechanisms that LeBon said describes crowd behaviour?
Contagion; Ideas with a crowd spread fast
Anonymity; No behaviour can be traced back to you as an individual
Suggestibility; People are more open to new ideas or new leaders.
Describe Hogg and Vaughan’s work on the crowd
They adapted LeBon’s model of the crowd and supported the idea that when in a crowd one becomes more violent. This idea is still held today in some aspects like riots.
When LeBon’s theory was revised more scientifically, what did the model become?
Describe it
- It became the deindividualisation theory.
- It contrasts against the idea of the group mind but it still believes that people become more prone to anti-normative, uncontrolled behaviour and their constraints against deviant behaviour decreases.
- This theory made the idea of the group mind unpopular.
- Zimbardo then created a deinvdividualisation model
List 2 traditional theories of crowd behaviour
LeBon’s theory
Deindividualisation theory
Describe Zimbardo’s deindividualisation model
It consists of three stages:
Input variables; the crowd causes anonymity and group size affects behaviour also.
Subjective changes; You have decreased self-observation and decreased concern for social evaluation.
Output behaviour; This results in impulsive behaviour, disinhibition, uncontrolled behaviour etc.
When in a crowd with no anonymity, is your anti-social behaviour likely to b higher or lower?
Lower
Describe Zimbardo’s 1969 study
- It was a similar set up to Milgram’s experiment.
- All of the participants were female.
- People who were deindividulated with a cloak and hood gave shocks that were far longer than those who were in plain clothes.
Describe Diener’s contemporary approach of deindividuation to explain crowd behaviour
- When not in a crowd, we focus on objective self-awareness, whether it is private self awareness or public.
- However, when in a crowd, this reduces. Attentional cues reduces it as they cause an output of self awareness. This then results in anti-normative behaviour.
- Public and private self awareness was developed by Prentice-Dunn and Rogers. There is a clear distinction between the two.
- Some see public self awareness as an extension of objective self awareness.
List some problems with the deindividuation theory with evidence
- Postmes and Spears did a review study looking at effect sizes and found that there was little empirical support for the theory.
- There wasn’t any cause and effect between group size/anonymity and anti-normative behaviour. Therefore it can’t be confirmed that anonymity reduces self awareness.
- There was contradictory evidence where people who are deindividuated still behave normatively.
- Johnson and Downing found this. There was no difference between people who were individuated and deindividuated when delivering shock intensity. However, when they were dressed as nurses, they acted normatively (for a nurse) and delivered shocks much less. Especially when deindividuated.
- Deindividuation doesn’t explain all types of crowd behaviour
What has historical evidence shown about crowd behaviour?
It shows that crowd behaviour isn’t chaotic and irrational but it’s actually structured and disciplined. People usually have a purpose to get justice or redress injustice. This made psychologists rethink crowd behaviour and they began to focus on change instead of loss (e.g. identity).
Discuss what the Social Identity Theory (SIT) is
Taifel and Turner explored this. It’s a distinction between your personal self and your social self. Your social self identifies in many groups called intergroups, e.g. gender. Normative behaviour, motivations and social comparisons change within a group and this is collective behaviour.
