In 2011, four of the major news events of the year concerned mass social
influence or the spread of
behaviours. The so-called Arab Spring is said to have begun with a
self-immolation in Tunisia. The protests there escalated until President Ben
Ali was forced to step down in mid-January. Egypt’s uprising also began with a
self-immolation and eventually forced President Mubarek out of office as more
people joined in. Uprisings of varying forms also took place in Yemen, Bahrain and eventually
Libya, with unrest reported across the Arab region as a whole.
In July, the plunging financial markets across the world were said to be subject to ‘contagion’, suggesting that ‘fear’ and ‘panic’ were rapidly
spreading among investors.
In August, the term ‘contagion’ was mobilized again – although more often the term used was ‘copy-cat’ – to ‘explain’ the spread of riots from
Tottenham to Hackney, Ealing, Clapham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Salford and other
places.
Then there was the ‘Occupy’ movement. This began in Wall Street, New
York, but soon spread to other cites in the USA as well as to the UK, in
particular to St Paul’s, London.
The terminology used in each of these news stories tell us a lot about
how the events were evaluated. Specifically, the term ‘contagion’ is not simply
descriptive, but serves to construct events as negative and pathological.
In the UK media, the ‘Arab Spring’ ‘uprisings’ were largely described as
a good thing, while the UK ‘riots’ were condemned. In fact, there was a very well-worn
repertoire which was used to characterize the events in London, Birmingham,
Manchester and so on: converge, submerge, and copy-cat. The riots were said to be about the ‘convergence’ of people who were ‘simply criminals’, their ‘submergence’ in the crowd (which
supposedly leads to being ‘swept up’, ‘carried away’ and hence loss of self-restraint),
and then the supposedly mindless ‘copy-cat’
riots, as ‘other people’ did the same thing elsewhere. The effects of
investor behaviour on financial markets was also seen as bad; however, while the
Occupy movement undoubtedly seen by some commentators as bad, this was not usually
on a par with an illness. Perhaps this was because of their ‘moral’ message;
bad behaviour in the markets was already the target. But maybe it was also
because these events, unlike the riots, were not ‘violent’.
What’s wrong with
‘contagion’?
‘Contagion’ and associated metaphors are therefore not neutral terms
used simply to describe. They are also weapons. In nineteenth century France,
the notion that crowd behaviour is pathological became systematized and
rationalized through the introduction to social science of a medical discourse
(not only ‘contagion’, but also ‘feverishness’ and ‘delirium’) by the psycho-historian
Taine.1
Of all the ways to describe social influence and the rapid spread of
ideas, beliefs, feelings and behaviours, why choose a disease metaphor? Why
choose a term that likens the process to a sickness or illness? The concept
buys you the implication that the spread is bad, or toxic, debilitating or
harmful in some way. But it also implies that the spread is uncritical, simple,
non-cognitive, primitive – that anyone is susceptible to just anything.
Contagion is implied to be a non-rational process, maybe a deeply irrational
one.
Whether the spread of a behaviour, idea or sentiment is good or bad may
be a value judgement. But whether or not just any behaviour spreads to just
anyone is an empirical question.
As Milgram and Toch (1969)2 pointed out in their critique of
Le Bon, if behaviours and sentiments spread through contagion all those simply ‘submerged’ in a crowd,
why aren’t riot police affected by the words of crowd demagogues? Why do the
protestors in the crowd behave one way and the riot police another way? What
are the limits of spread?
The riot in the St Pauls district of Bristol, in 1980, afforded a
systematic test of the idea that just any behaviours do not spread
indiscriminately among just anyone. The riot was the first of the big 1980s
urban riots. The event which was suggested to have set it off was a police raid
on a local café. It was certainly a violent event – there were attacks on the
police and on property; over 20 police vehicles were damaged. However, analysis of the event showed that there were clear limits to the spread of behaviours
that simply do not make sense in terms of ‘contagion’. In particular, there
were limits in terms of action. Essentially, the only people that were attacked
were the police. The property that was damaged comprised banks, the benefits
office, the rent office and the post office, and expensive shops owned by
‘outsiders’. But homes and small locally owned shops were actively protected.
And there was disapproval when someone threw a missile at a bus. In other
words, behaviours that were not consistent with the shared social identity of
those in the crowd – St Pauls residents – did not spread.
Recent research has added to this by showing how the
spread of the 1981 riots – Toxteth, Brixton, Handsworth and others – was not
random. Participants in the different cities did not mindlessly ‘copy-cat’ just
any other person doing any action simply because they heard of it and had seen
it on their televisions. Through a combination of mathematical modeling and
oral history, the research was able to show that the riots spread partly
through shared subcultural networks and partly when people recognize themselves
and their own experiences in the others they saw rioting.3 This
point will be developed below.
Can contagion be
rehabilitated?
For those in the mass media casting about for words to describe the
rapid spread of a protest or direct action movement, whether in Algeria or Florida, ‘contagion’ is as an easy, off-the-shelf cliché. Looking at the origins
of the term historically, the problems are clear. For the early ‘crowd
scientists’, the crowd was an alien other – a source of irrational behaviour and
hence of society’s ills. They sought to combat the crowd, and pathologizing it
was a means of achieving that – for the attribution of irrationality served to
rationalize increased coercion.
In some areas of contemporary academia, though, there has been an
attempt to rehabilitate the concept. An example is network analysis, which have
attempted to redefine contagion as a form of rational social decision-making.
But why try to reclaim this notion with all its baggage? Wouldn’t a more
neutral concept like social influence or spread be less problematic? It might
be possible to redefine ‘contagion’ as rational by stipulation; but the trouble
is that it already has 100 years of history in which it refers to an irrational
and pathological process.
In psychology, ‘contagion’ persists in the concept of ‘emotional
contagion’. This is said to be an often non-conscious transmission of mood
between people. The implication is, again, that this is primitive and hence
non-cognitive; and the origins and indeed pathologizing implications of the concept appear to be ignored by many who use the term.
From a social identity perspective, the problem with the concept of
‘emotional contagion’, and indeed the types of paradigms that have been used to
show evidence for it, is that there is a neglect of the meaning-defining role
of group memberships. Implicit in studies where people ‘catch’ moods and
emotions off others is shared group membership. Of course others’ laughter and
tears is ‘infectious’ – in a shared ‘human’
context. But imagine a context where the people expressing emotion are so
deeply ‘other’, where their world is so different from or irrelevant to yours,
that the source of their emotions and feelings are alien too. Will you catch
them then? We will be running some experiments to show that so-called
‘emotional contagion’ effects will be diminished in ‘alien’ contexts, but
increased in those contexts where shared group membership is salient.
Social identification and
empowerment: An alternative to contagion
An alternative to ‘contagion’ as an explanation for the spread of
behaviours in the ‘Arab Spring’, the UK riots and the ‘Occupy’ movement is in
terms of social identification and
empowerment. In this account, whether in Tunisia, Tottenham and New York, only
those who identified with the participants in these events – those who felt
‘this is us’ – would have felt encouraged or uplifted by them and hence have
felt able to join in.4
In these cases, identifying with the crowd (as ‘us’) in each event also
means recognizing the same enemy. For those involved in the riots, the police
in Tottenham were not distinguished from the police in Hackney, for example:
they were just the police, and equally illegitimate and vulnerable in each
case.
Therefore, where ‘we’ act and ‘they’ are seen to retreat in an event elsewhere, ‘we’ can infer that that
‘the same’ action may be possible here too. Only those who identify are
empowered. There is no need to posit a different kind of theoretical account
for what has happened in the ‘Arab Spring’ and the Occupy movement than in the
case of the UK riots. The actions spread – they became a movement – because the
relevant people took strength from the fact that they, as a physically dispersed
but psychologically unified group, were seen to be able to objectify their
understanding of how the world should be. We have been testing these ideas
directly with some simple experiments. However, all the coverage and
participant accounts produced following each of the movements fits this
analysis.
Notes
1 McClelland, J. S. (1989). The crowd and the mob: From Plato to Canetti.
London: Unwin Hyman.
2
Milgram, S. & Toch, H. (1969). Collective behavior: Crowds and social
movements. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology. Volume 4. (Second edition).
Reading, Mass: Addison Wesley.
3 Ball, R. (2011). Violent urban disturbance in
England in 1981. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of West of England.
4 The case of the markets is
different, for a number of reasons. First, there is a question over whether the market should be understood as constituting a psychological crowd at all. Second, unlike the three social movements, the markets are not an otherwise
subordinate social group whose action changes their social relations. Therefore, third, if
there is any shared social identification – if people in the financial markets
do use others’ conduct as a guide for their own conduct – this social influence
may well be as bounded (to ‘people like us’) as it is in any other ‘crowd’, but
it can hardly be understood as a process of empowerment.
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