Why do people riot?

 https://theconversation.com/why-do-people-riot-261903 

The August 2024 riots: Empowerment of the xenophobes

The riots in some English towns this week came 13 years almost to the day after the wave of riots that swept England following the killing of Mark Duggan in London, 2011. There are some parallels, but also some crucial differences. The 2011 riots were driven to a significant extent by anti-police anger and resentment. The 2024 riots are driven by racism: xenophobia and Islamophobia. The other parallel is with what happened immediately after the Brexit vote in 2016 and the Trump victory in the same year. Each was followed by a spike in hate crimes, most of which were ‘racially’ motivated. The Trump victory was also followed by an upsurge in far-right street mobilizations.

A lot has been said about the role of ‘coordination’ in the August 2024 xenophobic riots. But there is a significant ‘spontaneous’ element that also needs explanation, as does the relation between coordination and spontaneity in collective events like these. This is where social psychology comes in.

A short answer to the question of why the August riots spread is meta-perception and collective empowerment of specific group identities. ‘Meta-perception’ refers to what people believe about what other people believe. Collective empowerment in events like these can have different sources.

First, it can arise from a belief about public opinion. With the unexpected Brexit and Trump results in 2016, xenophobes suddenly (and mistakenly) believed that their racist views were widely shared. They thought they would be supported if they took threatening and violent action against those they perceived as ‘foreign’. The Brexit and Trump hate-crime spikes were driven by empowerment, not just grievance.

Why might people at the first of the August wave of xenophobic riots (Southport, 30^th July) feel their views were widely shared? Social media has been highlighted. But note also that, just three days before, ‘thousands of people’ marched in London on the ‘Tommy Robinson’ ‘patriots’ demo. A big demonstration is a way of building a sense that ‘you are not alone’, that many others think like you, and so of capacity building.

Second, empowerment can arise within the events. Where police appear increasingly unable to prevent the rioting, people in further locations gain a sense of vicarious empowerment. They believe the police locally won’t cope either. Although activists have been identified as leading players in the far-right riots, where others share with them the police as a common outgroup, they too can become empowered. This helps explain why other people less committed to the xenophobic ideology also start joining in.

Moreover, enacting their xenophobic identity in a way they are not usually able (through attacks on shops, hotels etc. but also defeating the police) is itself empowering to them because it reverses normal social relations. It enhances their sense of agency. It fuels another kind of spread. Those involved now feel confident to do the same again, perhaps travelling to another location to do so.

Third, collective empowerment can arise from the expectation that like-minded others will come out onto the streets locally. The precondition for this expectation is the participant’s belief that there are others locally who broadly agree with them and who therefore constitute an ‘us’ or ‘we’. When there is a critical mass of such people, a riot can occur. When riots happen in other locations over ‘similar’ issues, such people increasingly believe that people will now come out on to their own streets locally. Belief that others like self will come onto the street provides expectations of support for ingroup normative action (in this case xenophobic action) and hence the intention to act. The social media calls from the far-right activists could help promote the expectation also, by creating an impression of widespread intentions.

Solutions to this crisis of xenophobic riots from a social psychological perspective address these empowerment processes at source. First, potential participants need to understand that there is not the wider public support they think there is for their views, that the opposite is the case. Second, prevent them mobilizing and marching, to limit that capacity-building. Third, prevent their actions (including smaller acts of hate) from having a tangible impact – prevent them from turning their subjective identity into objective reality – by negating and cancelling out their effects. And fourth, as it is particular identities that are empowered or disempowered, assert and support collective identities antagonistic to theirs. For example, well-organized and -attended groups and activities based on international class solidarity help to defeat racism and xenophobia on the streets by making such solidarity more realistic than the racist vision.

This analysis and these kinds of actions also address the wider problem of why people support tyrannical systems such as fascism. These movements gain much of their support from being seen able to put their beliefs into practice. Their capacity for organizing and achieving their goals legitimizes them and gives them credibility. Undermining their capacity to act and organize undermines their credibility in the eyes of others who might consider supporting them. 

After George Floyd: Why does civil unrest spread between cities?

Protests and riots that began in Minneapolis after police killed an unarmed African American have now spread to over 23 states. I recently led a large-scale programme of research on the wave of riots in England in 2011 to address the question of how such events spread. The UK and US waves were different in important ways – most obviously, in the US many of the collective events have been peaceful protests, whereas in England only the initial protest was peaceful. Yet there are some striking similarities between them, as well as with other waves of riots. This similarity suggests that some of the same processes are operating.

It's necessary to begin by examining the meaning of the precipitating incident and the social categories involved. What did ‘they’ do, and who are ‘we’?

In Minneapolis 2020, as in Tottenham in 2011 (and as in Watts 1965, Brixton 1981 and many others), actions by police officers against an individual encapsulated the whole relationship between a wider group and an institution. In each case, the violence inflicted was seen as embodying the history of relations between police and Black / African-American people, where police harassment, assault, and collective humiliation were a daily experience.

Our research found that a local history of police harassment was key predictor of which districts rioted in London in 2011. Other predictors were local deprivation and negative attitudes to the police. Research in the US has found that race is another predictor of where riots occur. These factors correlate, of course: African-Americans are more likely to live in deprived districts and to be subject to police harassment and killing.

But these factors are relatively constant. They help explain which cities riot, but they don’t tell us when and how protest or rioting in one city influences people in other cities to join a wave. 

We found three types of social-psychological processes that helped explain how a wave occurs. 

First, there is spread via a shared identity with those in other cities. This is where people in different locations each define themselves in terms of a similar shared history of injustice at racist policing and resistance to that injustice. Our interviewees said of the police killing of Mark Duggan in 2011, ‘that could have been me’ and ‘that could have been my friends’. This shared identity with those rioting in response to the killing provided a normative motivation to do the same in their own district: the police needed to be shown that they cannot get away with murder. In the case of the George Floyd events, African American identity, defined in terms of a history of police violence, is clearly a key factor leading people in many cities to feel the same sense of injustice and anger as those in Minneapolis. For these people, and for others who feel solidarity with African Americans, action to express that sense of injustice – including punishing the police – is an enactment of common identity.

Second, there is a process that social movement researchers call capacity to mobilize and protest researchers call collective efficacy. In our research, we use the term empowerment. This captures the experience of one’s social relations becoming transformed as power shifts from the police to the crowd. In the English riots, some participants didn’t necessarily identify with the original rioters. But they could see that a common outgroup -- the police – were becoming weakened. This empowered them to participate in their own area, including going beyond the initial issue to enact long-standing grievances and desires. 

People’s perceptions of the identity and empowerment of others was crucial. They came onto the streets when they not only identified with the other location or were empowered by police weakness but also believed that others locally felt the same way. This in turn was the basis of expectations of support for ingroup normative actions – in this case against the police and some properties.

The third process that helps explain riot spread concerns police perceptions. We found that previous rioting led to a heightened level of organizational vigilance in the police. This state of expectancy can lead to pre-emptive forms of police intervention -- such as violent dispersal of a non-violent crowd. Where people in the crowd experience these police actions as illegitimate and indiscriminate, there are significant unintended consequences. Such actions by police serve to unite the crowd – both those who did not originally intend to fight and those who did -- around a new norm of fighting back against the police. 

Some of the coverage of the current wave of US riots has tried to suggest that powerful agitators are involved, with the implication that the crowd is easily swayed. Like the ‘contagion’ metaphor that is so frequently employed in these contexts, it suggests an unthinking crowd and therefore detracts from the meaningfulness of crowd action. Notions of mindless influence do not explain who joins in (and who doesn’t). Nor do they explain the widespread selectivity of targets. Such notions also let the authorities off the hook. As our research has shown, and the events across the US illustrate, the spread of riots is a complex social phenomenon grounded in collective definitions of identity, injustice, and changing power relations between groups.

'There are no rioters in Hong Kong'

A new blogpost by Patricio Saavedra which provides a research perspective on the recent events in Hong Kong (July 2019)

https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/crowdsidentities/2019/07/03/there-are-no-rioters-in-hong-kong/

The social relations of 'stop & search'

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/31/police-stop-and-search-riots-2011-london

How do street actions strengthen social movements?

There is evidence that recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, which saw a mass mobilization of white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, and Nazis have served to embolden and strengthen these groups, who are now ‘bursting with confidence’. The Vice documentary, filmed among the groups as the events took place, showed how the aim of the mobilization was to build the movement psychologically:

‘that camaraderie is and trust is built on activism, and that is one of the tactics we’re adopting’ (‘Unite the Right’ organizer quoted in Vice documentary)

The documentary also showed how the participants felt about and interpreted their mobilization. They took encouragement from the sheer fact of organizing together, being on the streets in such numbers, from imposing themselves on their opponents in this ‘liberal’ town, in expressing themselves:

‘This is the largest nationalist rally in over two decades in the United States. It’s been incredibly exciting… We’re going to keep having a good time and keep fighting.’ (‘Unite the Right’ organizer quoted in Vice documentary)

They were empowered to such a degree that they felt confident there were would be more such events in the near future and that these would escalate, both qualitatively and quantitatively:

‘I think it’s going to be difficult to top, but we’re up to the challenge… I think a lot more people are going to die before we’re done here.’ (‘Unite the Right’ organizer quoted in Vice documentary)

Recent social psychology research can explain how this strengthening process operates in social movements, and can also predict when and how it spreads to individuals and groups not physically present on the mobilization but who feel the same way as the marchers. Most of this research so far has been carried out on campaign groups and issues very different in political content from the fascist-type mobilization in Charlottesville: student fees protesters, Occupy supporters, environmental activists, and so on. But in terms of process, there are key concepts and explanatory principles that can be carried across.

Salience and match of self-categorization are two key concepts here. Based on self-categorization theory, research shows that, in different contexts, we can define ourselves in terms of personal characteristics (our personal identity) but also in terms of shared category memberships (collective or social identity). If our social identity is salient, and if it corresponds to the identity of those involved in the mobilization, then intergroup emotions theory would suggest that we will get emotional (and other) benefits from the event in the same way as the participants themselves.

What are these emotional and other benefits of collective action? Work on appraisal in collective action suggests that, for those who identify with the group, the perception of our group taking action enhances our collective efficacy – our belief in our capacity to act. Seeing social support in our group taking action tells us that we will have social support for further action.

But what is the nature of this action? Does just any collective action have these empowering effects for participants and their supporters? Other research shows that it is specifically collective actions which enact identity which have this effect. We call these forms of action collective self-objectification. By turning the subjective (ideas) into something objective (hard reality), such action operates for participants as tangible evidence of their group’s enhanced agency relative to other groups, and hence is experienced as empowering.

This was clearly going on in Charlottesville, where what was previously limited to an online network now manifested itself physically. To ‘own’ the streets, to be able to shout anti-Semitic slogans, to intimidate the ‘liberals’ and ‘racial’ groups who wanted to remove the statue of General Lee – all these were ways of enacting identity and, as such, imposing a particular definition of the world on opponents. These activities therefore empowered participants, or, in more conventional psychological language, increased their collective efficacy.

From efficacy there may be just a short step to gaining legitimacy. In their BBC prison study, Reicher and Haslam showed that the prisoners turned to tyranny when it was seen to be able to operate when a more democratic system was not. Practical adequacy – the perceived ability of an organization to put its beliefs into practice – increases the extent to which it is seen as a legitimate political force by others. We have recently investigated this in the context of the student movement in Chile, where the main predictor of non-participants' belief that the students’ protest action was legitimate was the perceived efficacy of the movement.

So what is the solution? The collective action literature points to the role of success or failure in increasing or reducing further mobilization. In psychological terms, success for a social movement is again action which realizes the identity – collective self-objectification – whereas failure is the enactment of the opponent’s identity and the negation of one’s own.

In our field-world and interviews and in our current experiments, we found that those actions that realized the participants’ shared identity were particularly rewarding and increased intentions to take part in further collective action, whereas those actions that ended in failure of collective self-objectification led to demoralization and reduced intentions to act. This was particularly the case for those with relatively little experience of protest. It would apply, for example, to the wider population of neophyte sympathisers that the fascist groups attempt to inspire through their shows of strength and identity enactment.

In history, the street violence of Kristallnacht sparked a further rise in anti-Semitic attacks and consolidated the rise of the Nazis in Germany; and events such as the 1936 battle of Cable Street, actions by the 43 group after the second world war, and the 1977 battle of Lewisham set fascism back as a movement. Put simply, controlling the streets builds the movement and getting them off the streets works in defeating that movement.
Of course non-violent tactics also work – my own PhD research examined how one predominantly non-violent direct action campaign had great success in making road-building seen as a political issue and in problematizing the then government’s road-building programme. But pure pacifism relies on a humanism which, if the opponents do not share – if the opponents regard us as less than human – will lead to our defeat not theirs.

Explaining involuntary influence: Beyond contagion

A recent article on the Brexit debate suggested that there is a fear among Governments that Brexit would lead to ‘referendum contagion’. The term ‘contagion’ here denotes not only the idea of behaviour spreading rapidly, but also that this spread is uncontainable and undesirable in some way. It is a term that seems to be ubiquitous today. But it appears perhaps most regularly in three particular contexts: explanations for the spread of emotion; accounts of stock market ‘panics’; and explanations for the spread of violence.

On the one hand, the concept of ‘contagion’ seems to do a good job in describing the fact that behaviours spread from person to person. It seems to be the only way to conceptualize the phenomena when we seek to explain how, as in 2011, riots began in London but then seemingly similar rioting then subsequently occurred in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, apparently as a direct consequence of these first riots. The core idea of ‘contagion’ is that, particularly in crowds, mere exposure to the behaviour of others leads observers to behave in the same way. As well as being a popular cliché among journalists, ‘contagion’ is found to be a vital tool in academic accounts. In a recent Google Scholar search, we found 500 hits for 2015 alone, and very few of them referring to spreading disease. In research, ‘contagion’ is now used to explain everything from ‘basic’ responses such as smiling and yawning (where the mere act of witnessing someone yawn or smile can invoke the same response in another) to these complex phenomena we have mentioned, like the behaviour of financial markets and rioting. What is more, laboratory experiments on the ‘contagion’ of simple responses (such as yawning) serve to underpin the plausibility of ‘contagion’ accounts as applied to complex phenomena (such as rioting).

Despite this widespread acceptance, the ‘contagion’ account has major problems in explaining the spread of behaviours. In particular, there are boundaries to such spread. If men smile at a sexist joke, will feminists also smile in response to the men’s smiles? If people riot in one town, why is it that they also riot in some towns but not others? For example, in 2011, disturbances spread from London to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham but they did not spread to Sheffield, Glasgow and parts of Leeds.

The concept of ‘contagion’ cannot answer such questions. ‘Mere touch’ (literal or metaphorical) may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for influence. The notion of ‘contagion’ assumes that transmission is automatic. It does not take account of the social relations between the transmitter and receiver. The best it can do is simply re-describe, in a limited way, the fact of involuntary influence, rather than explain it. At worst, it pathologizes influence in crowds and elsewhere, by likening it to the action of a disease.

This month, we (Steve Reicher, Clifford Stott and I, along with research fellows Fergus Neville and Roger Ball) started work on an ESRC-funded project to test a new account of behavioural transmission, based on the social identity approach in social psychology. This approach suggests that influence processes are limited by group boundaries and group content: we are more influenced by ingroup members than by outgroup members, and we are more influenced by that which is consonant with rather than contradictory to group norms. The social identity approach is therefore ideally suited to explaining the social limits to influence, both for ‘basic’ phenomena and rioting.

Because the concept of ‘contagion’ has been employed across a range of settings, we will be using different research designs to address it and test an alternative. These include a series of experimental studies to examine generic processes, but also make use of a large body of secondary data to look at the specific case of the 2011 riots, where ‘contagion’ was one of the explanations mobilised to ‘explain’ the spread of behaviours.  We will use our findings to generate a wider debate about the nature of psychological transmission and the practicalities of addressing them.

This research is funded by the ESRC, Ref ES/N01068X/1