From the local anti-roads protest to social and psychological transformation

Anti-roads direct action – camps, tunnels, tree occupations – has recently been in the news. The development of anti-roads camp near Hastings has led to speculation that there might emerge an anti-roads movement like that of the 1990s, in response to the government’s revival of the national roads programme,

In the 1990s, my PhD research was focused on the No M11 Link Road Campaign, in Wanstead and Leytonstone (east London), and identified a number of connections between the social issue of road protests and psychological issues.

The starting point of the research was an analysis of the participants’ own understandings – of themselves, their actions and their social worlds. This analysis revealed a number of contrasts with the understandings of those outside the anti-roads movement. First, there was the question of ‘politics’. At that time, many commentators were bemoaning the apparent indifference of young people to politics. Yet this pessimistic view was based on a narrow conception of what counts as ‘politics’; while many of the No M11 participants did not vote for the political parties, they certainly saw their activity as a form of politics; and they were deeply engaged, informed and passionate about it.

What was that ‘political’ activity? Whereas for most extra-parliamentary groups political action consisted of ‘protest’ and demonstration marches, the No M11 participants rejected this model in favour of ‘direct action’. Unlike ‘protest’, ‘direct action’ did not mean simply asking the government to stop road-building, but actively preventing this road-building through their own activities, such as occupying construction sites.

 

The third contrast was in terms of how this direct action was understood by those inside and outside the campaign. The campaign maintained an ethos of ‘non-violence’, and regarded any of those within the group who transgressed against this principle as the exception. But those policing the campaign understood the campaign as ‘violent’ because of damage caused to property (such as site fences), and they saw those in the campaign who they accused of physically assaulting police officers as representative of the whole group.

This last contrast had a number of psychological consequences for campaign participants. Instead of being treated by the police as the respectable middle class residents they felt themselves to be, they found themselves being treated as an oppositional group. This led them to see themselves as oppositional. For them, the local anti-roads campaign had initially been essentially about ‘saving Wanstead’; but now it was about opposing the national roads programme, which they saw as being forced through by government, using the police as a ‘political’ battering ram.

The M11 link road was completed, but the government’s subsequent abandonment of the national roads programme was widely attributed to the disruption caused by the campaigns in Wanstead, Newbury, Fairmile and other places. In effect, campaign participants from the No M11 and other groups succeeded in translating their own understanding of road-building into ‘public opinion’. Road-building was now seen not just as a ‘technical’ matter, to be decided by highly controlled public enquiries, but as a deeply political and controversial issue that groups could affect outside the usual ‘political’ channels. Many participants’ newly political understanding of the government’s roads programme became extended to an opposition to ‘car culture’ and indeed to global environmental ‘injustice’. Hence the extension of their participation from the local campaign to the anti-car Reclaim the Streets, and from there to the worldwide anti-capitalist movement, made perfect sense.

As well as these changes in their participation in collective action, for many people there were changes in their personal lives. They made new friends, but fell out with other people that they used to regard as friends. They changed their consumer habits to become more ‘ethical’. They changed their views about the importance of a respectable appearance and lifestyle. And many no longer wanted anything to do with the police, even if their home was burgled.

The aim of my research was to understand these processes of change. The work led to the development of a new model of identity change in collective action. We argued that identity was the hinge between the psychological and the social, and helped explain the links between experiences in the campaign and various profound psychological changes. Specifically, we suggested that, through their identity-based action in the campaign ('defending Wanstead’, for example), many participants inadvertently changed the very context (their relationship with others, such as the police and government) that defined their identity. It was through construing the action by others (i.e. police) as representative of a wider category of ‘injustice’, and also in-group boundaries as much broader (‘all those affected by injustice’), that experiences in the No M11 anti-roads campaign led to wider social movement participation and indeed created the sense many had of being ‘a different (radicalized, empowered) person’.

One of the research projects I am currently supervising is looking more closely at similar psychological changes to those I observed at the No M11 campaign. The campaign we are studying is one in Scandinavia where ‘locals’ are coming to identify as ‘activists’. They are also reporting changes in their personal lives that, on the surface, are not obviously connected to the ‘environmental’ campaign they first got involved in. The research will examine their construals of the actions they are involved in. We will examine the extent to which the categories that participants use to conceptualize and talk about social relations in the campaign are changing and are being applied to other areas of their lives, leading to the observed changes in behaviour. What makes them define a phenomenon in the campaign as ‘the same’ as one in the home, for example? Judging by what we have seen in the anti-roads protests of the 1990s, this research is important not only for what it tells us about the profound phenomenological impact of participation in collective action, but also for the social and political significance of some of these psychological changes.

Reference

Drury, J., Reicher, S., & Stott, C. (2003). Transforming the boundaries of collective identity: From the ‘local’ anti-road campaign to ‘global’ resistance? Social Movement Studies, 2, 191-212.

Hillsborough and ‘crowd control’

The Independent Report into the 1989 Hillsborough football crowd tragedy has found that police made ‘strenuous efforts’ to shift blame for the 96 deaths to fans themselves. In today’s news coverage, the disaster itself is sometimes described as a ‘failure of crowd control’. These words echo the conclusions of the 1990 Taylor enquiry into the tragedy, which recommended all-seater stadia for English football grounds.

The words ‘crowd control’ are worth considering for a moment. Whenever my own research and specialism is described as ‘crowd control’ (which is quite often), I try to explain that this is wrong in important ways. I teach a course on 'crowd safety management' to crowd safety and events professionals, and the classic statement of the issue we refer to when we discuss this topic is that by Fruin, who is perhaps worth quoting at length:

‘Although the terms crowd management and crowd control are often used interchangeably, there are important differences. Crowd management is defined as the systematic planning for, and supervision of, the orderly movement and assembly of people. Crowd control is the restriction or limitation of group behavior.’ (Fruin, 2002, p. 6).

Fruin goes on to say ‘Inappropriate or poorly managed control procedures have precipitated crowd incidents rather than preventing them.’

Or, the way I put it in my lecture: ‘Approaching the crowd with a view to crowd control risks undermining crowd safety.'

Why? Part of the reason, I would argue, hinges on the dynamic relationship between crowd behaviour and the representations of crowds held by those responsible for crowd management (or crowd control). For crowds only need to be ‘controlled’ when someone thinks they represent a problem.

Broadly, there are two dominant types of representation of 'crowd problems' needing ‘control’. These can be found in both popular discourse and in academic accounts. The first suggests that, in crowds, there is a process of submergence, whereby individuals lose their sense of self and hence their intelligence and self control, becoming ‘swept up’ by any sentiment or behaviour spreading through the mass. The second representation, convergence, suggests that problematic crowds consist of problematic individuals – people who are already lacking in intelligence and self control – who in the crowd act as they do alone ‘only more so’, as Floyd Allport put it. These two accounts are often employed in loose combination in order to explain what is seen as irrational or mindless behaviour in crowds.

In my lecture on ‘crowd management versus crowd control’ on the crowd safety management module, one of our key examples is the Hillsborough tragedy. As the report published today reminds us, certain newspapers, most notably The Sun, claimed that the crushing of fans in the football stadium was due to ‘football hooliganism’. The journalists and the police said the crowd that day was inherently a problem because it represented the convergence of drunken individuals seeking gratuitous violence and ‘disorder’.

The cruel irony is that these fans that were vilified were the very people trying to save others, and in some cases risking their own lives to do so. As part of our ESRC-sponsored study of mass emergency behaviour, we interviewed some survivors of Hillsborough tragedy, who described a deeply harrowing scene yet also one of great humanity, as illustrated in the following extracts (taken from Drury, Cocking, & Reicher, 2009):

‘The behaviour of many people in that crowd and simply trying to help their fellow supporters was heroic in some cases. So I don’t think in my view there was any question that there was an organic sense of … unity of crowd behaviour. It was clearly the case, you know.. it was clearly the case that people were trying to get people who were seriously injured out of that crowd, it was seriously a case of trying to get people to hospital, get them to safety.. I just wish I’d been able to.. to prevail on a few more people not to.. put themselves in danger.’

‘It should be source of great pride to those people I think because you know, they were clearly in control of their own emotions and their own physical insecurity I mean a lot of people were very.. as I was you know.. you’re being pushed, you’re being crushed when you’re hot and bothered you’re beginning to fear for your own personal safety and yet they were I think controlling or tempering their emotions to help.. try and remedy the situation and help others who were clearly struggling’

 Picture courtesy of http://menmedia.co.uk

However, it wasn’t simply after the event that the police explained the disaster as due to drunken ‘hooligans’. Crucially, this view of the crowd was at the forefront of all their planning and the responses they made during the tragedy. This has been shown both in published research and is clear from numerous statements in the Independent Report published today:

‘It is evident from the disclosed documents that SYP [South Yorkshire Police] were preoccupied with crowd management, segregation and regulation to prevent potential disorder ... The Fire Service, however, raised concerns about provision for emergency evacuation of the terraces’

(p. 11)

And again on page 12:

‘a policing and stewarding mindset predominantly concerned with crowd disorder ... the delay in realising that the crisis in the central pens was a consequence of overcrowding rather than crowd disorder.’

And again on page 15:

‘the ‘prevention of hooliganism’ and ‘public disorder’ was the main priority. The custom and practice that had evolved within SYP for packing the pens was concerned primarily with controlling the crowd.’

‘Crowd control’ meant treating fans like animals, neglecting their safety. As Fruin says, crowd control is the ‘restriction or limitation’ of crowd behaviour – and this is done when someone regards that crowd as a ‘problem’. Crowd control is achieved with means such as barriers or coercion, which risk injury and even fatalities in the crowd.

These days, the leading crowd event safety experts agree that many problems in crowd events – including some of the most well-known crowd disasters – are due to problems in crowd management. Examples would example the failure to plan for sufficient space for the size and flow speed of the crowd, and the failure to communicate adequately with the crowd.

This kind of analysis, which moves attribution for crowd disasters away from the supposedly inherent psychological problems of the crowd (whether of ‘convergence’ or ‘submergence’) to deficiencies in management and planning, is a positive development. It suggests that crowd disasters are not simply something that ‘just happens’ from time to time due to the inherently primitive psychology of the crowd; rather, crowd disasters are preventable through improvements in knowledge about, and hence to the practice of, crowd safety management. It is far too late for the Hillsborough tragedy, of course, but the increased scientific interest in the psychology of crowd safety management, in both research and academic contexts, is a vital contribution to the critique of ‘crowd control’ and hence to safer crowd events in the future.

References

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, 487-506.

Fruin, J. J. (2002). The causes and prevention of crowd disasters. Originally presented at the First International Conference on Engineering for Crowd Safety, London, England, March 1993 (Revised exclusively for crowdsafe.com, January 2002.)

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/