Three forms of Covid leadership

If the Covid pandemic has made one thing is clear, it is that we are interdependent in terms of risk and safety. So a collective response is required. From distancing, through ventilation, to vaccination programmes, decisions needed to be taken at the level of the whole community, society, and indeed the world. We need a coordinated response that prioritizes and supports the most urgent actions. Leadership is therefore essential. Three forms of leadership have been particularly evident over the course of the pandemic: identity leadership, coercive leadership, and laissez faire leadership. Only one of these is actually effective in enabling the collective response we need.

 

Identity leadership

This is true leadership, in that it leads to active engagement by ‘followers’. It attempts to create unity and a shared perspective on the problem and the solution, and to support effective action by the public. 

Assumptions of this approach: The public have the intention and capacity to do the right thing, if properly informed and supported. Understanding the public as part of the solution, not the problem. Treating the public as a resource and a partner.

Practices: Bring the public with you through engagement, promoting mitigations on the basis of shared identity and values. Embodying those values. Giving clear direction based on ‘who we are’ (shared interests, needs, and values). Regulations and rules (e.g., mask mandates) as a way of promoting norms and shared definitions of seriousness. Explaining the rationale behind measures. Working with community support groups, including mutual aid groups, by listening to them and supporting them materially. 

Examples: Haslam et al. offer several examples including Bonnie Henry, who focused on her connections with her fellow British Columbians get them to listen to and embrace the demanding course of action that she was proposing. But perhaps the most cited example is that of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Adern’s use of identity rhetoric to mobilize her citizens.

Pros and Cons: May require considerable time and effort. Finding the leaders who have the required skills, background and motivation. But over two decades of research on the social psychology of leadership suggests that this approach will get the most active engagement and results.

 

Coercive leadership

The ‘command and control’ approach to managing emergencies has a long history. It occurs where the authorities have given up with, or don’t try, the more painstaking practices of engagement -- which include listening as well as talking. It represents a failure of leadership.

Assumptions of this approach: The public are a problem: they are wilfully obstructive or stupid or passive and ignorant.

Practices: As the public are assumed to be obstructive or stupid, forms of threat and punishment are foregrounded, including fines and imprisonment; and the mechanisms for such coercion are strengthened, such as surveillance and policing.

Examples: £10K fines for failing to self-isolate. Compulsory vaccination.

Pros and Cons: These approaches produce backfire effects among sections of the public, whereby the public health measures are perceived as impositions and become a site of struggle and resistance. Coercion creates long-term damage to the relationship with the authorities. It may lead to compliance in some people in the short-term, but in the longer term these people will be less likely to listen and engage with public health messages and policies.

 

Laissez faire leadership

This approach is the abdication of leadership. Under the guise of relying on public ‘common sense’ and ‘resilience’, it entails abandoning moral and practical support.

Assumptions of this approach: This approach assumes that correct understandings of risk and mitigation already exist in each individual’s ‘common sense’, that each individual is solely responsible for outcomes, and therefore that the public can be blamed (as ‘irresponsible’) when things go badly, providing a rationale for adopting the coercive approach instead.

Practices: Advice to ‘be cautious’, ‘stay alert’, and use ‘common sense’, instead of specific guidance. Emphasis on ‘personal judgement’. Dropping all rules and regulations. Limited material support.

Example: July 19th 2021 so-called ‘freedom day’ in the UK entailed dropping most of the rules and the mask mandate but failing to provide the public with the recommended education on risk and mitigation that would enable informed decisions.

Pros and Cons: ‘Common sense’ is a repository of competing ideas. Without clear guidance, exhortations like ‘be cautious’ are open to multiple interpretations: what does it actually mean in practice? Unlike rules specifying behaviour – such as ‘stay home’ – it’s not clear to do with this advice on ‘how to feel’. By individualizing judgements of risk, there is a danger of people seeing risk simply in personal terms rather than in terms of others (including those more vulnerable than themselves). Worse, insufficient material support (including proper compensation for staying home and support for safe schools) means that, even where people understand how to act safely, they don’t have the resources to do so. Without clear leadership representing the collective will and properly organized support to equip members of the public with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions, this approach risks a chaotic and dangerous individualism.

 

 

 

Don’t personalise, collectivise!

Don’t personalise, collectivise!

The way we deal with the coronavirus is bound up with the way we think about society and about the individual. And the problem is that we are in danger of getting it wrong on all counts, with the consequence that we will be less effective in containing the virus. There is nothing new about us being wrong. But this time, lives are at stake.

The   assumption, which is reflected in the advice being handed out to the public, is that the way to change behaviour is to appeal to individual interests. To make sure people take notice, personalise the message: ‘change your behaviour so that you will survive’. Surely that makes sense? Well no. It is precisely the wrong thing to do. Here’s why. 

At a practical level, those least at risk (young, fit, healthy) may well feel it isn’t worthwhile to make the necessary changes and so continue to act in ways that put the most vulnerable (old and infirm) at risk of infection. Additionally, at a moral level, we have the right to disregard dangers to ourselves and some even glory in being risk takers. It might be foolish, but it isn’t disreputable to ignore safety advice.

On top of this, if we frame things individually – look after yourself! – we run into difficulties when it comes to getting people to behave in ways that are inconvenient to themselves but benefit others (self quarantining, for instance). The same goes when it comes to distributing scarce resources (doctors time, medicines, hand gel etc.). If we prioritise the individual then the strongest rather than the neediest will win out. In both cases, the pursuit of self-interest is inefficient, it undermines the overall response to the crisis and many more will die. 

Our own research on emergencies (Drury et al., 2019)  shows that it is precisely when people stop thinking in terms of ‘I’ and start thinking in terms of ‘we’ – more technically, when they develop a sense of shared social identity – that they start to coordinate, support each-other and ensure that the neediest get the greatest help. Sometimes this sense of shared identity emerges by the very fact of experiencing a common threat. But messaging also matters. When a threat is framed in group rather than individual terms, the public response is more robust and more effective (Carter et al., 2013).

So, let’s look again at the coronavirus response. Instead of personalising the issue we need to collectivise it. The key issue is not so much ‘will I survive’ as ‘how do we get through it’. The emphasis must lie on how we can act to ensure that the most vulnerable amongst us are protected and losses to the community are minimised – after all, from a collective perspective, a loss to one is a loss to all.

If framed in this way, then it becomes important for everyone to wash their hands and cover their coughs because of the implications for others as well as for themselves. Moreover, while we might have a right to take risks for ourselves, we have a moral obligation to avoid imposing risks on others (especially those who are vulnerable and connected to us – just think how your driving changes when you have children in the car). Both of these considerations are powerful motivators of action (Reicher & Haslam, 2009).

What is more, once certain actions become communal issues subject to collective norms, then violating them invokes collective pressure. The best way to stop people going out when unwell or demanding resources they need less than others is not simply to change internal motivations but also to mobilise external disapproval. The feverish person who goes to work, the fit young person demanding access to A&E will be best dissuaded when the community comes together to make clear that these are not acceptable behaviours.

Once you collectivise the response to coronavirus, and once you create clear norms about maximising community well-being, then you become less reliant upon external forces such as the police to regulate behaviours – say around who is prioritised in getting medical help – with all the risk of clashes that entails. Instead, the community itself will constrain would-be deviants in their midst. As always, the best regulation is collective self-regulation (Reicher et al., 2004). 

The difficulty with this approach, of course, is that it is so much at odds with contemporary psychological commonsense, which insists that behaviour is governed by individual self interest. It is also at odds with social changes which relentlessly undermine communities and collectivities, seek to transform social groups into individual consumers and view every relationship as a market based interpersonal exchange. In this sense, perhaps coronavirus is a powerful wake-up call. 

We have to change the way we frame the epidemic.

We have to change we see the individual and society.

We have to collectivise – or we die.

Stephen Reicher, University of St. Andrews

John Drury, University of Sussex

References

Carter, H., Drury, J., Rubin, G., Williams, R. and Amlôt, R. (2013), "The effect of communication during mass decontamination", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp. 132-147. https://doi.org/10.1108/09653561311325280

Drury, J., Carter, H., Cocking, C., Ntontis, E., Tekin Guven, S., & Amlôt, R. (2019). Facilitating collective psychosocial resilience in the public in emergencies: Twelve recommendations based on the social identity approach. Frontiers in Public Health, 7 (141) doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2019.00141

Drury, J., & Alfadhli, K. (2019). Social identity, emergencies and disasters. In R. Williams, S. Bailey, B. Kamaldeep, S. A. Haslam, C. Haslam, V. Kemp, & D. Maughan (Eds). Social scaffolding: Applying the lessons of contemporary social science to health, public mental health and healthcare. London: Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Drury, J., Cocking, C., & Reicher, S. (2009). The nature of collective resilience: Survivor reactions to the 2005 London bombings. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 27(1), 66-95.

Drury, J., Cocking, C., & Reicher, S. (2009). Everyone for themselves? A comparative study of crowd solidarity among emergency survivors. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48(3), 487-506.

Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2009). Beyond help: a social psychology of social solidarity and social cohesion. In M. Snyder, & S. Sturmer (Eds.), The Psychology of Prosocical Behaviour Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 

Vilas, X., & Sabucedo, J. M. (2012). Moral obligation: A forgotten dimension in the analysis of collective action. Revista de Psicología Social, 27(3), 369-375.

Reicher, S., Stott, C., Cronin, P. and Adang, O. (2004), "An integrated approach to crowd psychology and public order policing", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 27 No. 4, pp. 558-572. https://doi.org/10.1108/13639510410566271

Stott, C., Adang, O., Livingstone, A., & Schreiber, M. (2008). Tackling football hooliganism: A quantitative study of public order, policing and crowd psychology. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 14(2), 115-141. doi:10.1037/a0013419

Originally published in The Psychologist: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-33/april-2020/coronavirus-psychological-perspectives

A 10-point listicle on journalist accounts of the public responses to events in Oxford Street, November 2017

A brief commentary for journalists and others on the events in Oxford Street, Friday 24th November 2017, when members of the public responded to fears of gunfire or a terrorist attack.

1.    In the footage from Oxford Street, many people are looking where they are going, assessing the situation, or otherwise moving in an orderly way, or standing around etc. Only a few people scream.

2.    Research evidence on emergency evacuations shows that coordination and order is common. Pushing and trampling occurs rarely and tends to be in narrow exits that are unfamiliar. Coordination reduces when people don’t see themselves as a ‘we’ or ‘us’.

3.    It is not clear that the number of injuries reported is particularly high for the number of people involved. 

4.    Research on fires shows that people often underestimate danger and/ or delay their exit (to respond, to stay with others). This, not over-reaction, is a main cause of fatalities.

5.    Research shows that there isn’t indiscriminate ‘contagion’. People attend most to, and follow the example of, those they judge to be relevant for the context, who are often people they define as similar to self.

6.    The word ‘panic’ was common in the news accounts, but researchers reject the term because it is hard to evidence.

7.    What is gained by saying ‘panic’ (rather than 'fleeing') is the implication that the behaviour is an overreaction, is unreasonable. But what should people do when the information they have is that there is a threat? ‘Sudden fear’ or ‘fleeing’ are more neutral terms.

8.    Journalists seemed to describe responses as ‘panic’ because it wasn’t after all a real emergency; but in many real emergencies people don’t know whether it is real or not (including fires and terrorist attacks).

9.    A first irony of the journalists’ use of the term ‘panic’ for the public response is that the government’s advice is to ‘run’ (this is not necessarily an endorsement).

10. A second irony is that the image of a vulnerable panic-prone public, rather than collectively resilient, is precisely what ISIS and others seek to achieve.

The social psychology of the Hajj

This week, the annual Hajj takes place in Mecca (Makkah) and the other holy places nearby. This Muslim pilgrimage is one of the world’s largest crowd events – the official figure for those attending last year was 1,862,909. The Hajj has been called the world’s ‘global gathering’ because it is a place where Muslims from all over the world come together. The Hajj has also been the scene of a number of tragedies, including the crush in 2015 where over 700 people died at a crossroads near the holy city of Mina.

Despite its global significance and importance to so many people, few psychological studies have been carried out on the Hajj. Most research studies of the events are from medical or engineering perspectives. Hani Alnabulsi, my PhD student, and I recently had a unique opportunity to study the experience and behaviour of the Hajj crowd, through his research on the 2011 and 2012 pilgrimages. As part of his PhD at Sussex, Hani carried out dozens of interviews and surveyed over 1000 pilgrims, all in and around the Grand Mosque, Mecca. This unique data-set allowed us to address a number of important questions on the social psychology of the Hajj for the first time. Hani finished his PhD in 2015, and we are now in the process of writing up the work as journal articles. Here is a summary of some of the key findings.

Inset shows density of 6ppm2 inside the Mosque

How do people feel safe in such dense crowds?

In a first analysis, we looked at predictors of feeling safe in the Hajj crowd, which can reach densities of up to nine people per metre² near the Ka’aba. We tested the hypothesis that the effect of crowd density on feeling safe would vary depending on whether there is shared social identification in the crowd. Analysis of the data showed that the negative effect of crowd density on reported safety was indeed moderated by social identification with the crowd. Whereas low identifiers reported reduced safety with greater crowd density, high identifiers actually reported increased safety with greater crowd density. Mediation analysis suggested that a reason that some people felt safer was the perception that other crowd members were supportive. We also found that those from Arab countries and Iran felt especially safe at the Hajj compared with pilgrims from other countries. These differences in reported safety across national groups also seemed to be because these groups experienced greater crowd identification and perceived support than other groups.

Psychological changes, including changed attitudes to other social groups

Towards the end of his autobiography, the activist Malcolm X described in compelling terms the revelation he experienced on attending the Hajj:

My pilgrimage broadened my scope. It blessed me with new insight. In two weeks in the Holy Land, I saw what I had never seen in thirty-nine years here in America. I saw all races, all colors, - blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans – in true brotherhood! In unity! … It was in the Holy World that my attitude was changed, by what I experienced there, and by what I witnessed there, in terms of brotherhood – not just brotherhood toward me, but brotherhood between all men, of all nationalities and complexions, who were there. (pp. 478-479, emphasis in original)

His was not a unique experience. A brilliant ‘natural experiment’ carried out by Clingingsmith and colleagues on a large sample of Pakistanis famously showed that participation in the Hajj can lead to both more positive attitudes towards other groups and increased commitment to Muslim identity. In a second analysis, we have been investigating the process underlying these psychological changes. In line with contact theory and the social identity approach, we found that a key mechanism explaining increased positive attitudes to outgroups was identification with the Hajj crowd, which operates like common ingroup identity. In line with a social identity account of identity enactment, we found that the key mechanism explaining enhanced identification was giving social support to others. Our finding that participation in an all-Muslim gathering increases positive views of other groups (including non-Muslims) through crowd identification offers an alternative perspective to claims about the supposed role of such gatherings in encouraging intolerance.

Place, space and the virtuous cycle of cooperation

The requirement to cooperate at Hajj is not only a shared spiritual value, but also a practical necessity due to the high levels of crowd density. In a third analysis, we sought to understand the determinants of cooperation in and around the Grand Mosque during the pilgrimage. In Hani’s interviews, pilgrims described ecstatic experiences on seeing and being close to the Ka’aba. However, precisely because of its spiritual value, many pilgrims seek to be close to the Ka’aba at the same time. This leads to negative (e.g., competitive pushing) as well as positive (e.g., social support) experiences in the Mosque. Our survey analysis found that evidence of help was high across the participants, but was more likely to be reported in the plaza just outside the Mosque than inside the Mosque itself. We also found evidence of what we called a virtuous cycle of cooperation: seeing others in the crowd giving support predicted seeing them as good Muslims which predicted identification with the crowd which itself predicted giving help to others. This predictive pattern occurred in the plaza but not the Mosque itself, and suggests the role of place and space in modulating identity processes.

Conclusion

In the past, where the social psychology of the Hajj has been addressed it has been through concepts such as ‘panic’ and ‘stampede’. However, use of these concepts is not based on systematic study of pilgrims’ behaviour and experience. In addition, such concepts serve to blame the crowd, rather than mismanagement, for disasters. Hani Alnabulsi’s PhD research is the first to bring modern social psychological concepts to the Hajj – in particular the concepts of social identity and group norm. We argue that these concepts will not only provide a more accurate understanding of behaviour at the Hajj, they can also help contribute to a safer Hajj in the future by informing the planning and management of this global gathering.