The ideology of the madding crowd: Learning lessons from our history

A brief commentary to coincide with the anniversary of the August 2011 riots, by Clifford Stott & John  Drury, published in The Occupied Times of London 16 (August, 2012)

At the Olympics, transport chiefs must trust the wisdom of crowds

Crowd control [sic] is often driven by a fear of panic and selfish behaviour, but this view is out of date – communication is key

• Clifford Stott and John Drury
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 July 201

The logic of ‘panic buying’

This week, the government (and the mass media) have been criticized for promoting ‘panic-buying’ of petrol in the context of a possible tanker drivers strike. Here at Sussex University, we have been looking at the use of the word ‘panic’, and at the kinds of behaviours that are sometimes labelled in this way. We have also worked alongside emergency planners and crowd safety management professionals on this question of communication in possible emergency situations. Based on this work, there are three simple points to make about the current situation of supposed ‘panic-buying’.

Run on the Seamen's Savings' Bank during the so-called ‘panic’ of 1857 (courtesy of Wikipedia commons)

 

1, Don’t say ‘don’t panic’

The first point is that the advice ‘don’t panic’ is worse than useless. When those in authority say ‘don’t panic’, or even ‘stay calm’, the rest of us know by this that there is definitely something we should be anxious about – for why else would they be warning us in this way? And why else should they be so concerned about our emotional responses if not because they think there is something that we might ‘panic’ about? In the present case, the advice that there was no crisis, but that people should fill up their cars just in case, was as good as advice to act exactly as though a crisis was imminent and therefore to fill up as much as we can.

2, Belief that there is ‘panic’ makes it logical to act individualistically

The advice ‘don’t panic’ is based on the mistrust by the government of the (potentially irrational) ‘masses’. In turn it sows mistrust. It does this in two ways. First, the advice communicates that the government is holding something (scary) back from the public, so creates mistrust between public and government. Second, reference to ‘panic’ risks creating mistrust amongst members of the public themselves. When the government and the mass media tell us that our neighbours are ‘panic-buying’, we imagine those around us acting individualistically, rushing to hoard goods for themselves. And if we imagine that everyone else is acting this way, it becomes foolishly self-sacrificial to do otherwise oneself. Rather, it becomes completely logical to look after number one. The result is that we trust our neighbours less to act patiently and in the collective interest.

3, ‘Panic buying’ is not panic

The third point is that the large queues and the rush to stock up does not really fit the criteria for panic. Journalists reporting from the scene of petrol queues note with surprise the calm, boredom and stoicism of the people waiting in line. ‘Panic’ is a clinical condition marked by an excessive fear and anxiety reaction, the physiological signs of which include raised heart rate, shortened breath, sweating and so on. This excessive anxiety prompts reckless, uncontrolled behaviour. People queuing for petrol in so-called ‘panic buying’ may be acting in their personal interest rather than the collective interest, but this is cognitively driven rather than an instinctive ‘flight or fight’ response. The queuing and bulk-buying  is logical - given people's reasonable beliefs about others’ behaviour and their reasonable mistrust of the authorities.  And there is no spread of irrational beliefs or emotions through these crowds. As I have argued elsewhere, there is no evidence to support the argument that crowds are susceptible to the uncritical spread of simple emotions through so-called ‘contagion’:‘mass panic’ is a myth. 

It is often the mass media, more than the politicians, who mobilize the ‘panic’ cliché to describe consumer queuing and stock piling. It is perhaps encouraging to report, therefore, that not all journalists are so lazy. After an interview we gave on Radio Leicester to discuss our ESRC research project on mass emergency behaviour, the reporters were so convinced by the argument that they made it a policy not to use the term in future.

However, we don’t think that solutions to the problems produced by mutual mistrust and individualism lie only or essentially in changing the messages given out by those in authority. It was notable that, in his nervous back-tracking, David Cameron referred to ‘resilience’ as just a quality of the state and its functionaries. We have been exploring the informal resilience of crowds, which expresses itself in solidarity and is a function of shared social identity among crowd members. We are currently running some experiments to show that, when people think of themselves in terms of their social identities (e.g., ‘me as a member of my community’) they will be more cooperative, less ready to push in to queues, and more willing to share dwindling supplies with strangers than when they think of themselves in terms of their personal identities (e.g., ‘me as distinct from others in my community’). If the outcomes of the behaviours labelled as 'panic-buying' are dysfunctional for the collective (e.g., more acute shortages for most as the minority hoard goods) it is precisely because people in the crowd are acting reasonably as individuals,  rather than as members of a psychologically united crowd; cf. Mintz, 1951.)

References

Drury, J., Cocking, C., & Reicher, S. (2009). Everyone for themselves? A comparative study of crowd solidarity amongst emergency survivors.British Journal of Social Psychology, 48, 487-506. DOI:10.1348/014466608X357893

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, 66-95.

Mintz, A. (1951). Non-adaptive group behavior. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46, 150-159.

2011 - The year of contagion?

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.

Credit: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/12/4/1323012542109/Rioting-in-Toxteth-Liverp-007.jpg

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.

  

Reference

Drury, J. (2002). ‘When the mobs are looking for witches to burn, nobody's safe’: Talking about the reactionary crowd. Discourse& Society, 13, 41-73.

Collective joy and the power of the crowd

A social psychological perspective on

Melanie Manchot’s exhibition ‘Gathering’

Fabrica gallery, Brighton, 8 October - 27 November 2011

http://fabrica.org.uk/exhibitions/

Psychology has much to say about crowds, their power, and the strong emotions that arise from participation in them. This article describes recent research that addresses the themes on display in Melanie Manchot’s two video installations, ‘Celebration (Cyprus Street)’ and ‘Walk (Square)’.

Coming together

Celebration (Cyprus Street) is inspired by the tradition of street parties in London’s East End and was developed over a period of six months with the residents of Cyprus Street. It was filmed as a single continuous event, through the technique of tracking through the streets and the crowds. The participants could be described as diverse; but they are also together, as one, and it is obvious that they are present on the street to be with one another and that this is a joyful experience.

The film draws our attention to an apparent paradox of everyday experience. On the one hand, we seek out and enjoy crowds. When we celebrate we want to do so with others. We enjoy festivals, music and sports events when there is an atmosphere that only a big crowd can provide. But we also find some crowding aversive. We value our ‘personal space’. Recent research has addressed this apparent paradox. (1) This research suggests that, in order to understand why being in a crowd can produce such varied reactions in the same person, we need to conceptualize the self as multiple and variable, based on our various group memberships. The same degree of density or proximity is experienced positively or negatively depending upon which of our group identities is salient.

This argument can be illustrated with a recent experimental study.(2) Participants were each invited to pull up a chair to wherever they felt most comfortable, in anticipation of discussion with a stranger. Prior to this, they had been given a bogus ‘test’ of their ‘communication styles’. They were told either that the stranger was of the same ‘communication style’ as them or a different style. In fact the test and hence the two ‘groups’ were meaningless. But the participants didn’t know this, and reliably positioned the chair closer to the expected ‘in-group’ member than the ‘out-group’ member. This result suggests that our enjoyment (or dislike) of closeness with others, whether interpersonally or in a crowd, is shaped by whichever of our various identities is salient, rather than by a fixed ‘personal space’ boundary.

The effect shown in this experiment has been replicated with a range of other measures,(3) including self-reported preferences, negative and positive emotions, and even expressions of disgust: people report less disgust for exactly the same body odour when it is categorized as ‘us’ than when it is ‘them’!

Studies of actual crowds provide some real-world validation for this analysis. In November 2007, a march and rally was organized by UNISON, the public sector workers’ union, to protest against the then government’s attempts to privatize the NHS. We surveyed over 100 demonstrators, and found that those who identified most with the crowd sought a more central (i.e., more crowded) physical location, and hence closer proximity, to their fellow crowd members. In addition, immersion in the crowd was associated with collective joy. Specifically, those who identified most with the crowd reported a more positive experience, in part due to being in close physical proximity to their fellow crowd members.(4)

Taken together therefore, the recent research says something about why we gather together with others (because they identify in the same way that we do), and why it feels good when we are in a crowd with these others.(5) But when we come together as a crowd, we often move and act together. What are the psychological effects of such collective coordination?

Acting together

In Melanie Manchot’s video installation ‘Walk (Square)’, 1000 school children are shown moving in lines toward a city square, where they merge to become part of a huge choreographed crowd. They then move together, synchronizing their walking to form patterns that change, dissolve and re-form.

Walk (Square) is the result of an event constructed by Manchot but inspired by real situations involving walking as a form of expression: processions, parades, pilgrimages and protest marches, such as those in the recent wave of mass demonstrations from the UK to the Middle East.

If the striking choreography leads the viewer to see the performers as a single entity, it is possible that the performers themselves may do the same, for this is what recent research in social psychology has found. In the NHS demonstration study described above, we found that participants’ sense of being psychologically part of the crowd – their social identity – increased through participation in the event. Collective joy also increased over the course of the event, and was partly due to this shared social identity.

Our explanation for these results was that physical co-action in a group or crowd can dissolve the psychological boundary between individual and collective, while intensifying our positive emotional responses. But a field study like this cannot rule out the possibility that some other factor was responsible (such as passing of time, or communication, or changing relations with outside groups).

A follow-up study was carried out in the psychology laboratory, which enabled us to control all the conditions and so identify any causal relations, rather than simply infer them as in the demonstration study.(6) Participants arranged at close physical proximity in small groups were asked to learn clapping patterns of the type heard in football crowds. They performed the patterns in the group, either in synchrony or individually. As predicted, only participants who synchronized their movement came to see themselves as part of their group and experienced increased positive emotion.

These studies therefore show that moving together as one in time can serve to construct a collective identity. This is why rallies and marches are important in building social movements. It is no coincidence that Melanie Manchot’s two works are inspired not only by mass pilgrimages, processions, and parades, but also by recent mass demonstrations across both the Arab world and the UK.

A marching crowd is not only expressive, and therefore rich in meanings and symbols, but is also purposive. That purpose may be social change. Of course, most crowds do not aim to bring about social change. Many crowds in fact only exist to reproduce or validate the status quo – for example through religious ritual or national ceremony. But social change very often involves crowds.(7) Even crowd events that are supposed to have a cathartic function may also include a rebellious undertone, threatening to the status quo. Early carnivals had this dual quality;(8) and riots are often described as having a ‘carnival atmosphere’, by both participants and those who observe them.(9)

Crowds and power therefore have a long association. Recent research has examined the psychology of power-change – empowerment – in people’s experience of crowd events. Studies of riots, anti-capitalist demonstrations, anti-roads direct actions, Reclaim the Streets parties, anti-war marches, as well as numerous experimental simulations, have each shown the same pattern. We feel more able to take collective actions that we define as legitimate, yet which may not be permitted by others outside the crowd (such as the authorities and police), when we perceive that others in the crowd support us in our aims and action.(10)

Comparative studies of protest movements add that a sense of collective agency can be both cause and consequence of such collective action.(11) In order to act, we need to believe we are capable of such action. But, through our action and its impact on the world, we authenticate and confirm our own collective agency; the material results of our collective actions stand as evidence of the power of our collective identities.

Finally, research on activists’ experiences shows that collective actions that shift or challenge existing power relations feel joyful, exhilarating and even euphoric. (12) They feel good; and they may even be good for us, since the sense of agency and social support associated with collective action are established predictors of wellbeing.(13)

Melanie Manchot’s two works ‘Celebration (Cyprus Street)’ and ‘Walk (Square)’ are about the relationship between individual and crowd, about our collective identities, and about how we behave in public space. A central message is that, through its action, the crowd can both express and construct our sense of self. Recent research in social psychology suggests that the power of the crowd – the collective support, collective agency and collective joy it affords – comes not from a loss of self, but from the augmentation of the self. To paraphrase John Turner, a founder of the social identity approach in group psychology, the psychological crowd ‘is precisely the adaptive mechanism that frees human beings from the restrictions of, and allows them to be more than just, individual persons’ (Turner, 1987, p. 67).(14)

John Drury and David Novelli

This article was commissioned by Fabrica and part funded by the European Union Two Seas Programme. It extends work that the gallery has carried out since 2009 linking artists’ perspectives with current scientific research at leading Universities in the UK.

Dr John Drury is senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Sussex. His research interests include crowd empowerment, solidarity in mass emergencies, and positive experiences of ‘crowding’. His research includes studies of anti-poll tax riots and anti-roads direct action and survivor responses to the London bombings. He has just edited, with Dr Clifford Stott, a special issue of the journal Contemporary Social Science on the topic of crowds. He is currently supervising research projects on the Hajj to Mecca, collective action and wellbeing, and crowd communication by the emergency services.

Dr David Novelli is a social psychologist at the University of Sussex, specialising in crowds. His research focuses on how social identities and group memberships influence the ways in which we experience being in crowds, and how acting together in crowds can affect positive emotions and feelings of solidarity. This year David was awarded the annual prize for the country’s most outstanding doctoral thesis by the British Psychological Society. He is currently looking at how our (positive and negative) experiences at large-scale music events can be shaped by assumptions about crowds held by those who organize and manage such events.

References

1.        Novelli, D. (2010). The social psychology of spatiality and crowding. Unpublished DPhil thesis. University of Sussex. Available online at http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/6275/1/Novelli,_David_Lee.pdf

2.       Novelli, D., Drury, J., & Reicher, S. (2010). Come together: Two studies concerning the impact of group relations on ‘personal space’. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49, 223–236.

3.      Novelli, D. (2010) op. cit.

4.       Novelli, D., Drury, J., & Reicher, S. (2011). The relationship between psychological and physical group processes and their impact on the experience of crowding: Evidence from a field study. Unpublished manuscript. University of Sussex.

5.        Novelli, D. (2010) op. cit.

6.       Novelli, D., Drury, J., & Reicher, S. (2011). Synchronized movement as a cause of social identity and positive emotion. Unpublished manuscript. University of Sussex.

7.       Ackerman, P., & Kruegler, C. (1994). Strategic nonviolent conflict: The dynamics of people power in the twentieth century. Westport, CT: Praeger.

8.       Davis, N. Z. (1971). The reasons of misrule: Youth groups and charivaris in sixteenth-century France. Past and Present, 50, 41-75.

9.       Reicher, S. & Potter, J. (1985). Psychological theory as intergroup perspective: A comparative analysis of ‘scientific’ and ‘lay’ accounts of crowd events. Human Relations, 38, 167-189.

10.   Drury, J., & Reicher, S. (2009). Collective psychological empowerment as a model of social change: Researching crowds and power. Journal of Social Issues, 65, 707-725.

11.   Drury, J., & Reicher, S. (2005). Explaining enduring empowerment: A comparative study of collective action and psychological outcomes. European Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 35-58

12.   Drury, J., Cocking, C., Beale, J., Hanson, C., & Rapley, F. (2005). The phenomenology of empowerment in collective action. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 309-328

13.   Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2006). Stressing the group: Social identity and the unfolding dynamics of responses to stress. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 1037-1052.
14.  Turner, J. (1987). A self-categorisation theory. In Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D. & Wetherell, M. S., Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory (pp. 42-67). Oxford: Blackwell.

Background

Melanie Manchot's 2010 film Celebration (Cyprus Street) is a portrait of an East End neighbourhood, for which Manchot worked closely with local residents to create a street party, which she filmed.  Her more recent work Walk (Square) invites young participants to walk together and undertake basic choreographed movements. Celebration (Cyprus Street) was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, and Walk (Square) by Deichtorhallen Museum in Hamburg; both were exhibited at Fabrica gallery in Brighton, in October / November 2011. The exhibition ran at the same time as White Night, an event that invited local residents to take part in cultural activity throughout the night and in so doing created a new kind of social space which connected the city in a new way. 

Manchot described the focus of these works for photography publication Vignette in October 2011: “Both Celebration (Cyprus Street) and Walk (Square) investigate a position between individual and collective experience, and aim to do so through group portraiture.  In these works I set up an event with participants who are, on the whole, strangers to me and to each other, and who come together through the processes of the work.  The notion of ‘event’ is central to these works as it is the event, the proposition of a performative situation that the participants engage with – and that they then fill with their action.  

Both works consciously chart a space – and a tension – between choreography and documentation, between construction and chaos.  And in many ways this applies to my practice in general, this interest in setting up situations, constructing a scenario, which then develops its very own dynamic, where the people then enact their motivations.

Celebration (Cyprus Street) and Walk (Square) are both based on real events, ‘real life’ so to speak: in one case on historic street parties and the social function they embodied and the other on the recent surge of demonstrations, marches, protests both in the UK and around the world.  But rather than being political as such, in the case of both works it is the making of art, of a moving image project, that brings people onto the streets.  And public space, the streets and squares we share as social space are another theme that runs through these works as well as through much of my practice”

Acknowledgements

Celebration (Cyprus Street) was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and supported by Arts Council England. Funded by Film London and the UK Film Council Digital Archive Film Fund and supported by the National Lottery.
Walk (Square) was commissioned by Deichtorhallen and Kulturforum 21, Hamburg for the exhibition Wunder. Walk (Square) received additional funding from Film and Video Umbrella. The activities connected to the exhibition are also supported by Brighton & Hove Council, the IRIS Contemporary Art Network and Interreg, a European Union funding programme aimed at dialogue between neighbouring European countries. 

Gathering – 8 October – 27 November 2011 – Fabrica, Brighton UK

PDF version of this paper available here: http://fabrica.org.uk/2011/11/collective-joy-and-the-power-of-the-crowd/

What do the events of 9-11 tell us?

From the beginning, the mass evacuations of September 11^th 2001 were thought to tell us something important about the nature of collective responses to emergencies and disasters. In the months and years following the events, social scientists carried out detailed research investigations of behaviour during the evacuations. Some of their key findings were as follows:

- The building evacuations were highly successful; 99 per cent of occupants below the sites where the planes struck survived. The success was due in large part to efficient spontaneous mass coordination among the people who moved down the stairs of the World Trade Centre towers.

 - Cooperation and helping behaviour was common among the building evacuees

 - Panic was not a collective response; Ed Galea's team found that panic ‘was only noted in 1/124 (0.8%) cases’; gathering information was a more common response to the emergency.

 - Over one million people evacuated themselves from the area of New York affected by the disaster, and thousands of members of the public converged on the city in order to offer help to the survivors. A strong sense of community arose among those involved in the evacuation and in the relief effort.

What do these kind of findings mean for our understanding of the nature of collective responses to emergencies and disasters?

For researchers, this is further evidence against already discredited theories such as ‘mass panic’. Theories of ‘mass panic’ suggest that exaggerated fear responses to danger spread easily through a crowd in a process of ‘contagion’, leading to rash, uncoordinated and ultimately dysfunctional behavioural outcomes, such as fighting for and blocking exits. Against this, current thinking on group processes suggests that group membership is not a source of pathology but a source of strength. Psychological group membership provides expectations of unity, offers of support and hence the organization and collective agency people need to respond effectively to adversity. The evidence from the 9-11 evacuation is in line with this account of group processes.

However, the evidence of collective resilience during 9-11 has also been interpreted by some as telling us something about the national identity of the USA. In this account, the resilient behaviour of the evacuees stands for or represents the character of the rest of those included in the national category.

Are there cross-cultural differences in mass emergency behaviour?

On the one hand, and at least in one sense, it is surely right to say that the evidence from the 9-11 evacuations tells us something about American responses to adversity.

One (mis)reading of cross-cultural psychology gives rise to the question of whether people from individualist national cultures (like the USA) will display less solidarity in mass emergencies than those from ‘collectivist’ cultures (such as Japan). It is a question that I am often asked when I give research presentations. One answer to the question is that, across national cultures as diverse as Japan, the USA, Britain and Germany, the same pattern of solidarity (rather than mass panic) has been documented in response to mass emergencies and disasters. The evidence of mutual coordination and co-operation shown by ‘ordinary Americans’ in the 9-11 mass evacuations therefore undermines notions that this country’s individualist culture precludes the emergence of ties of solidarity and collective strength.

On the other hand, when the collective resilience witnessed in the 9-11 evacuations is taken by politicians and propagandists to demonstrate something special or exceptional about the psychology of the American national category, we can see problems. Specifically, there are two problems with this kind of claim.

Problem 1: Every national category is claimed by its leaders to be ‘special’ in times of war

The first problem is that representatives of every nation state try to claim that their citizens’ resilient response to adversity is special or even unique. It is no coincidence that highlighting public resilience and characterizing the resilient group as standing for the whole national category is particularly prominent in times of war.

In the second world war, the British state highlighted the ‘Blitz spirit’ of Londoners, who faced nightly bombing raids, as a way of raising national morale. The terminology and the image were less a neutral description of events than an attempt to mobilize and create national unity around the war. Following the London bombings of July 2005, politicians and commentators similarly evoked the ‘bulldog spirit’ of Londoners, attributing the calm orderly response of survivors to their special characteristics, which would again serve the nation well in a time of war 'against terror'.

As simple descriptions, these claims to exceptionalism are undermined by the same kind of review evidence that tells against the cross-cultural hypothesis. However, they are not simply descriptions. They are attempts to rally people to wars, and to bring about the resolve and unity of which they speak; they can also operate as exhortations to endure privations in the interest of war on behalf of the national category.

This takes us to the second problem.

Problem 2: Are we really ‘all in it together’?

The second problem with explaining events such as the 9-11 evacuations in terms of the qualities of the national category is that it glosses over possible differences among those included in 'the nation' in terms of interests, experiences and behaviours. Disaster psychologists tell us that both suffering and assistance are often distributed inequitably — reflecting structured inequality in resources (for example by class). 

Disaster sociologists and critical journalists add that ‘elites’ and ‘masses’ perceive and respond to emergencies and disasters differently. This can mean that definitions of collective threat may not be universally shared, and therefore that solidarity may be bounded. Specifically, the representatives of the ‘elites’ may regard the response of the mass as more problematic than the emergency itself, and act against the mass on this basis. This is perhaps most starkly illustrated in examples such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In that ‘national emergency’, grassroots solidarity arose particularly in the black working class. However the authorities neglected and imperilled their safety, demonized and pathologized them in propaganda, and colluded in their racist murder.

Accounts of the evacuation of 9-11, by contrast, paint a far less fragmented picture, and indeed illustrate how different sections of society displayed camaraderie during the evacuation.

However, the narrative of businesses and workers alike coming together in shared humanity is somewhat problematized by the fact that, when the first plane struck on 9-11, the immediate response of the Port Agency, who are in charge of the World Trade Centre buildings, was to urge employees to return to their desks. Luckily, most people ignored this advice!

And in the aftermath, a number of underlying social conflicts became explicit. One of the fundamental tensions within the national category was between the masses and the professionals acting on behalf of the ‘elite’. Grassroots and unofficial groups and networks had established themselves and were managing very well to organize food, housing, communications and security for evacuees. But official organizations moved in and sought to shut them down. The ‘festival of mutual aid’ was superseded by an 'elite panic’.

It was not the ‘elite’ and their professionals who effected the mass evacuations; the masses achieved it themselves. The 911 emergency call system was ineffective; the police and fire service did not coordinate properly; people organized evacuation and relief despite, not because of, the normal hierarchical rules and relations. The collective response to the emergency was effective precisely because it was not centrally directed; but professionalization of, and exclusive control over, humanitarian relief was nevertheless imposed. The national policy response went further: national (‘homeland’) security, emphasizing suspicion of one’s neighbours and the need for further centralized control. Through its actions, the ‘elite’ undermined sources of collective resilience and hence produced the very vulnerability - including paralysing fear, lack of freedom and reduced agency - that it was premised upon.

What do the events of 9-11 tell us?

The 9-11 evacuations tell us at least three things.

First these events illustrate very vividly the human potential for solidarity within groups in conditions of adversity.

Second, collective psychosocial resources – and especially the informal and context-dependent psychological groups we belong to – may well be more important than expert and professional response in times of emergency. For one thing, in a large scale emergency, the emergency professionals will simply not be in place in sufficient numbers to be effective.

Third, while the ‘elite’ therefore relies on the masses in emergency response, it also fears them. The otherwise useful concept of ‘elite panic’ could be read as implying that this fear is simply irrational. Elite responses may well be ill-judged, but they may be grounded in fear of real potentials. Following Charles Fritz, Rebecca Solnit argues that disasters are microcosms of mutual aid that may provide insightful glimpses of social possibility. It may be that elites recognize these subversive qualities too, and hence the potential danger to their own privileged position. 

Reference

Drury, J. (2012). Collective resilience in mass emergencies and disasters: A social identity model. In J. Jetten, C. Haslam, & S. A. Haslam (Eds.), The social cure: Identity, health, and well-being (pp. 195-215). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.