Six zombie ideas in crowd psychology

 

What are zombie ideas? These are ideas that keep coming back, even though they have been thoroughly refuted by the evidence. They should be dead, but they won’t stay dead! They keep coming back because they serve certain interests or prejudices (or both). Here are six zombie ideas in crowd psychology that keep cropping up in everyday talk, in the news, among policymakers and practitioners, and in academic publications. And here’s why they’re wrong.

1. De-individuation

The most distinctive claim in the ‘de-individuation’ family of theories was inherited from Gustave Le Bon – the idea that being anonymous leads to a loss of self and hence uncontrolled, anti-normative behaviour. This idea could not cope with the evidence that conditions of anonymity in fact are associated with a wide range of behaviours, including accentuation of pro-social behaviours. There is little evidence that anonymity leads to a ‘de-individuated’ state of reduced private self-awareness. Rather, anonymity makes group identities more salient and hence leads to more, not less, conformity to relevant situational norms.

Key reading: Postmes & Spears (1998)

Gustave Le Bon headstone

(Pierre-Yves Beaudouin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

2. Groupthink

While groupthink is supposedly a pitfall of small groups and organizations rather than crowds, I include it here as it’s another example of an anti-collectivist concept. It is used loosely by commentators to refer to any situation where group members prioritise the group’s own ideas over critical or external views. For example, some of those involved in decision-making at the height of the Covid pandemic have used the idea of groupthink to explain organizational failures in decision-making. The distinctive claim of the ‘groupthink’ concept is that highly cohesive groups will be subject to concurrence-seeking at the expense of critical inquiry, leading to faulty decisions. A big problem for this idea is that there is not much evidence that greater cohesiveness leads to worse decision-making. Rather than the tendency to ignore critical evidence being a function of groupness, it’s more likely to be an effect of particular group norms (for example that value loyalty).

Key reading: Aldag (2022)

3. Mass panic

Aside from the profound problems of judging whether behaviour counts as ‘panic’ in an emergency (what is reasonable behaviour in this situation?) and the related problem of trying to import a polysemic everyday term into scientific explanation, there is another basic problem. There is no evidence that people in crowds are typically uncontrolled, selfish or competitive in emergencies. The common finding of social support among people in emergencies adds to the problems of this concept.

Key reading: Clarke (2002)

4. Contagion

One of the most popular concepts in the social and behavioural sciences, ‘contagion’ is often used synonymously with spread and social influence. But there is little evidence that mere exposure alone is sufficient to prompt emulation. Group boundaries in the transmission of behaviours and emotions demonstrate this. Even for supposedly basic processes like so-called emotional contagion, reviews of the evidence suggest that the mimicry involved is not automatic, but rather relates to communication goals that already involve an emotional orientation to the other person.

Key reading: Drury et al. (2019)

5. The hooligan

The hooligan is a concept from sociology more than psychology, but it is a good example of a dispositional explanation. For the earliest beginnings of crowd psychology as a science, some have claimed that crowd conflict occurs through the convergence of certain kinds of individuals (usually with criminal, violent, or poorly socialized dispositions). From the 1960s urban riots in the USA to the 2011 English riots, proponents of such ideas have failed to produce the required evidence. In the football context, of course some groups seek conflict, but this in itself can’t explain collective behaviour. As Stott and Pearson explain, the 'hooligan' concept has little explanatory power: ‘disorder’ sometimes occurs when known ‘hooligans’ are not present; and when known ‘hooligans’ are present, ‘disorder’ doesn’t always take place.

Key reading: Pearson & Stott (2022)

6. Mob mentality

An overarching zombie idea, that links many of the above, but which also includes the distinctive claims that in crowds people revert to a simpler, less intelligent, and more primitive or archaic psychology, under the influence of which behaviour tends to gullibility, barbarism, loss of control, and violence. The fundamental problem here is two-fold. First, if this is a real tendency it cannot easily explain the majority of crowds, which are peaceful and pro-social. Second, the suggestion of a universal tendency like this cannot explain the social form of behaviour when there is crowd violence. To explain the distinct targets of the sans culottes, urban rioters, football fans and many others, and the sophistication in even the most violent crowd, it makes better sense to refer to their identities, group norms, and values.

Key reading: Reicher (1984)

What is a crowd? Implications for computer simulation

http://www.peoplemovementonline.com/what-is-a-crowd-implications-for-computer-simulation-dr-anne-templeton-and-dr-john-drury/

Responding to People’s Emotional Needs in an Emergency

https://www.festivalinsights.com/2018/07/responding-peoples-emotional-emergency/

Southern Rail and the psychology of crowd safety

I was asked today to appear on BBC Radio to comment on a report from the Association of British Commuters which described the recent experiences of passengers on Southern Rail trains and platforms. These testimonies painted a picture of stress, anxiety and fear for many passengers. The passengers’ concerns seemed understandable. People did not feel safe on the trains and platforms.

Based on the research on the psychology of crowd safety, two factors that are important in enhancing or diminishing the sense of safety that people feel in a crowd: density and relationships of trust.

On density, we know that density of five people per square metre (5ppm2) and above is objectively dangerous. Any push in a crowd of this density can cause a shock wave and a fatal crush. And dense crowds have very poor front-to-back communication, meaning that those at the back of a crowd have no idea how dense and dangerous it is at the front. So those at the back of a densely-packed platform could accidentally push those at the front onto the rail without realising.

Yet our research has shown that, in many crowds of far greater density than 5ppm², people report feeling safe. This is what we found in our study of pilgrims’ experiences in the Grand Mosque, Mecca, during Hajj. So what is the other factor that matters, that might be responsible for the feelings of anxiety and fear among Southern Rail passengers?

The other factor is a relationship of trust – specifically between the crowd and those managing the crowd, as our research on other kinds of stressful crowd events has shown. Commuters on trains rely on the company managing the trains and the stations. They rely on them:

·       To manage the numbers. When this isn’t done it undermines trust and confidence.

·       To have sufficient personnel available. This is one of the problems highlighted by the Association of British Commuters (ABC) report.

·       To ensure the personnel are sufficiently trained. One passenger comment in the ABC report is this: ‘on strike days, … more concern for me is that there never seem to be any safety-qualified staff either on the stations or on the trains’

·       To communicate reliably and regularly

If the company cannot be relied upon to do these things, the result is quite understandable passenger fear and anxiety.

Finally, the BBC asked me about the dangerous behaviour by some passengers. Crowds of people made ‘mad dashes’ across platforms to get to trains, sometimes risking their own and others’ safety. And there were repeated reports of fighting.

Anxiety and fear alone cannot account for these responses. When we looked at the behavioural responses of those commuters caught up in the London bombings of July 7th 2005, we found fear but we found almost none of these ‘antisocial’ responses. In both cases (bombing and Southern Rail today) there was ‘scarcity’ – either of safe passage or of trains running. But only in the case of Southern Rail today are these passengers put in the position of being individuals competing against other individuals. With a scarcity of trains, people defined as ‘customers’ compete, like people fighting over bargains in a sale. And with no reliable information from the companies, it is not surprising that people treat the next train as perhaps their last chance of getting home. Based on what we know about how common fate changes the boundaries of concern for people faced with disaster, perhaps the solution is collective identity and action as passengers (not ‘customers’) to change the current situation for the common good.

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

Impact: From riots to crowd safety - The Psychologist

Impact: From riots to crowd safety - The Psychologist

Bringing Crowd Psychology into Event Safety Management

http://www.festivalinsights.com/2015/07/bringing-crowd-psychology-event-safety-management/

The psychology of bank runs

The announcement today that Greek banks will be closed at least until the referendum on Sunday was apparently prompted by the decision of the European Central Bank (ECB) to end the financial support that has allowed the banks to function despite people withdrawing their money for months. The behaviour of the public in withdrawing their money has been described as a ‘bank run’ and, in some places, a ‘mass panic’. Based on our research and the wider literature on so-called ‘panics’ in crowds, three simple points can be made about the current Greek bank run.

1. It is misleading to describe the behaviour of people withdrawing their money as ‘mass panic’. In ordinary conversation, the term ‘panic’ is used to talk about, and to do, different things (such as blaming, excusing and so on); but one consistent association is that of the abandonment of social rules through undue haste. Yet the crowds depicted queuing at Greek ATMs, like those observed by sociologists studying bank runs, have been cooperative and orderly. Another association of the term ‘panic’ is extreme or sudden emotion. But, as is often the case in bank runs, the people queuing were also relatively calm. This suggests that emotion is not the defining issue in bank runs at all.

2. Participating in a bank run, particularly when it’s already begun, is often a reasonable course of action for the individuals concerned. Another implication of the term ‘panic’ is that such behaviour is self-defeating and irrational. In his study of the Home State Savings Bank Run in Cincinnati in 1985, Johnson pointed out that, when everybody else is taking their money out, the real risk is not to oneself but rather being last in the queue and the money runs out. All the individual withdrawals may lead to the collapse of the bank, and so have damaging consequences for the wider collective (including those who have yet to take their money out); yet appeals for people to be patient or to trust the bank would only be heeded where they perceive others (including those other banks and businesses withdrawing funds) to be patient and trusting.

3. Reassurances and other communicative acts may inadvertently create and sustain a bank run. In their study of the 2007 Northern Rock bank run, Gillespie and Cornish note that when the Bank of England gave Northern Rock an emergency loan, this was widely seen as a signal of the bank’s imminent demise. The BBC reported that ‘Treasury Select Committee chairman John McFall urged Northern Rock customers not to panic’. Yet, in a situation where trust was diminishing, such reassurances are likely to have backfire effects – which was precisely the case for Northern Rock.

A last point is that one reason that bank runs are described as panics is because the run is apparently based on a false belief or rumour. From the outside, and with access to all the relevant information, the commentator might be able to judge that the rumours were false – for example that the bank is not really in trouble (yet) and that there is no need (yet) to withdraw funds. But in the current context, when bankers and their allies in government have repeatedly lied and have constructed complex arrangements for their own profits around a series of financial fictions, who’s to say that the rumour among the public about the trustworthiness of the bank is an unreasonable belief? Who should people trust?

Arabic version:
https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/crowdsidentities/2015/06/30/the-psychology-of-bank-runs-arabic-version/

Greek version:
https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/crowdsidentities/2015/07/03/psychology-of-bank-runs-greek-version/