The power of the crowdThe power of the crowd

John DruryJohn Drury

University of SussexUniversity of Sussex

http://www.bankofideas.org.uk/events/event/the-power-of-the-crowd/

Crowd behaviourProtests, riots, ‘mass panics’, football

crowds, everyday crowds…

Everyone has an opinion

Experience?

Or is it dominant (negative) ‘common-sense’ images and representations…?

In films, literature, clichés…

Dominant (negative) ‘common-sense’ representations

Crowds are characterized by:

• Heightened emotionality

• Reduced intelligence and critical judgement

• People ‘swept up’, ‘carried away’ or ‘infected’ by crowd psychology

• Lack of self-control: Irrational, indiscriminate, mindless violence

• Madness – people do ‘crazy’ things, act ‘out of character’

An example of the crowd in literature: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

• The mob were ‘whipped up’ by Mark Anthony’s speech

• They murdered Cinna the Poet simply because his name was the same as that of one of the conspirators!

Early ‘scientific’ accounts of the crowd reproduce this ‘common sense’:

• Crowds are primitive• Crowds are over-emotional• Crowds are ‘instinctive’• Crowds are irrational• People in crowds lose themselves

and lose control

Gustave Le Bon

The power of the crowdThe power of the crowdThe argument:

• These common sense understandings and early scientific accounts are profoundly ideological – a distorted representation of reality that serves the interests of existing social relations

Specifically:

• The supposed 'madness' of the crowd is better understood as the power of collective identities that the crowd embodies

• The emotionality of the crowd is often the understandable joy associated with this crowd power

The power of the crowd

1. The origins of crowd science

2. The food riots

3. A social identity account

4. The St Pauls riot

5. Empowerment at the No M11 Link Road Campaign

6. The madness versus the power of the crowd: insider and outsider perspectives

‘Crowd science’

• Arose in late 19th century Europe – particularly France

• It was a response to ‘social problems’ of urbanization and unrest (Nye, 1975)

‘Social problems’ in late 19th c. FranceUrbanization

– Industrialization meant factories, mills

– Workers came from the villages to live in the cities

– The city became populated by the ‘anonymous’ ‘masses’

– Industrialization also meant workers’ organization and strikes…

‘Social problems’ in late 19th c. France

Unrest

French revolutions 1789, 1830, 1848

The architecture of Paris is a monument to fear of the crowd (Van Ginneken, 1992).

• After 1848, the streets were redesigned. • Narrow, easily barricaded streets were pulled

down• Replaced by long, straight, open boulevards

‘Social problems’ in late 19th c. France

The Paris Commune, 1871• Realisation of the European elites’ worst fears• Communards were:

– armed– socialist in ideas– proletarian in composition– ruthless against their enemies

‘Social problems’ in late 19th c. France

• ‘Problems’ of urbanization and unrest:

‘The crowd’ represented a threat to ‘civilization’ (i.e. the existing social order)

The legal question

• One of the first questions that ‘crowd scientists’ addressed was legal:

– Is the individual to be held legally responsible for what s/he does in the crowd?

– or is s/he ‘swept up’ in the mob mentality and not fully responsible for her violent actions?

The legal questionScipio Sighele (1891)• Crowds are largely comprised of people

who are criminal by ‘nature’• Hence these individuals could be held

personally responsible for their illegal actions when part of crowds.

Gabriel Tarde (1901)• By mere proximity people become ‘a

crowd’• Hence subject to uncritical imitation and

irrational behaviour

Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)

• The best remembered of all the early ‘crowd scientists’

• His book ‘The Crowd’ (1895) said to be the best selling social psychology book of all time

• Said to have influenced Hitler and Mussolini

Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)

• ‘The crowd’: A populist work

• Consists in large part of synthesis and plagiarism

• It represents in systematic form the concerns of the wider establishment:– What do crowds do to the rational individual?– How can the power of crowds be opposed or

harnessed?

‘…by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian – that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images … and to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’

(Le Bon, 1895, pp. 32-33)

Le Bon’s (1895) model

Three key concepts

• Submergence

• Suggestibility

• Contagion

• Despite its influence and impact, evidence shows that Le Bon’s account is incorrect in both its assumptions and its predictions.

Later: why there is such a strong attachment amongst certain sections of society to such incorrect but pathologizing models of the crowd

Case study 1: Food riots

• E.P. Thompson (1971) : Analysis of around 700 English food riots (1750-1820).

Immediate appearance:• ‘Instinctual’ explosions, born

out of desperation, expressing a ‘basic need’?

• Primitive, uncontrolled behaviours?

 

Case study 1: Food riots

1. Born out of sheer desperation?

• Riots didn’t happen at times of greatest shortage

• Riots happened when millers or merchants were seen to have transgressed popular notions of how food should be distributed:– hoarding food when it should be sold– transporting food when it should be sold locally– profiteering when food should be sold cheaply

Case study 1: Food riots

2. Primitive and uncontrolled behaviour?

• Seizure of food was typically not indiscriminate • Food riots are more punishment than theft:

– grain was seized– sold at a ‘popular’ price– the money and often the grain sacks were handed

back to the merchants!  

Case study 1: Food riots

"mixed crowds of ordinary people gather angrily before the shops of a miller, a merchant or a baker. They complain about prices, seize the food on hand cart it off to the market square, sell it to all comers (so long as they belong to the community) at a price they declare to be just, turn over the cash to the owner of the grain or bread, and go home saying they have done justice, as the authorities themselves should have done justice"

Tilly, C., Tilly, L. & Tilly, R. (1975) The rebellious century: 1830 - 1930. London: Dent.

 

Case study 1: Food riotsCrowd behaviour was restrained,

selective, disciplined and patterned rather than being out of control.

• Why? How?

 • Thompson (1971): all crowd action in

18th c. is based on a legitimizing notion shared by crowd participants – a belief that they were all defending (traditional) rights– Legitimized direct action

Review evidence:Problems for the notion of crowd madness

1. Violence?• Most crowds are not violent

• Where there is violence, there are patterns, limits and selectivity in even in the most passionate of events: violence isn’t indiscriminate

• Different riots often have different patterns & targets based on their specific legitimizing notions:

• Food riots targeted merchants• Urban rioters targeted police

Review evidence:Problems for the notion of crowd madness

2. Context• Crowd conflict needs to be understood in relation to its

social context – proximal context (there are two groups)– distal context (history of relations)

• Violence is linked to incidents that are significant for understandings of group relationships

• Without reference to context, crowd violence appears to be a meaningless outburst

A new approach: Social identity

We have personal identities and multiple social identities

• Crowd behaviour reflects not a loss of identity and hence rationality and control, but a shift from personal to social identity, and hence to social-identity based self-control

• Shared social identity defines who joins in, who is influential, and what they do (norms)

Case study 2: The St Pauls (Bristol) riot (1980)

• The first of the big urban riots of the 1980s.

• The event which was suggested to have set it off was a police raid on a local café in the St Pauls district of Bristol

• Importance of the café to the local community

• There were several incidents of violence between police and a crowd outside the café

• Police and their vehicle struck with hale of bricks

• Police were forced to flee.

• Some police were trapped in the cafe

• Police returned with reinforcements

• More and more people joined in attacking them

• Police vehicle set alight

• Running battles

• Eventually, the police had to leave the area entirely,‘in disarray’.

Second phase

• After the police had left

• The crowd took charge of traffic control, stopping suspected police cars entering the area.

• Certain property came under attack and there was some looting.

• Of 60 police, 22 injured, 27 minor injuries

• 21 police vehicles damaged

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdyo16VMhIQ

Analysis

Shared social identity of participants: ‘Members of the St Pauls community’. Defined in terms of: • Locality• ‘the ability to lead a free life’(vs poverty)• the antagonistic relationship with police.

The pattern of (limits to) behaviour in the riot reflected this shared social identity.

Three types of limits in the conflict that reflected the shared social identity

1. Geographical limits– The rioting remained within St Pauls. The

crowd directed traffic flow

2. Who joined in?– Only those who shared the identity took part in the

rioting and were influenced by other crowd participants

Who was the most influential?

Prototypes for the social category at that time: older Rastas

3. Targets of attack

Collective targets versus individual targets: what generalized?

– People: • Only the police (and journalists). • Passers by moved safely through the crowd• Fire service were helped in phase 1

3. Targets of attack (cont.)

– Property

• banks, the benefits office, the rent office and the post office were attacked: ‘these were not just symbols but the very agents of their continued powerlessness’

• Expensive shops owned by ‘outsiders’ and chains were attacked and looted

• Homes and small locally owned shops were actively protected in phase 2 when looting took place

• Disapproval when someone threw a missile at a bus

The St Pauls riot – some conclusions• This analysis shows how social identity shapes and limits

crowd behaviour• It tells a different story than the crowd science notions of

submergence, contagion and madness

• BUT it doesn’t address the psychological outcomes of this crowd event

Psychological outcomes: • Participants felt pride, joy, confidence after the event, i.e.

power and emotion

The final case study will use the latest thinking in crowd psychology to explain these outcomes as a transformation in social identity towards empowerment

Case study 3: Empowerment at the No M11 link road campaign (1993)

• This crowd wanted to prevent a motorway being built through their ‘village green’.

• In those days, the debate used to stop at the end of the public enquiry. But this crowd continued the argument, through practice.

• The people who gathered to protest were initially quite fragmented – they were ‘protesters’ on the one hand and ‘local residents’ on the other.

• Their shared relationship to the roadbuilding and their shared exclusion from the site of that building, which was surrounded by fences, brought them together and made them feel as one.

• It created an expectation of support for action against the road.

• This is about what happened next…

• They gathered for a symbolic tree-dressing ceremony on the green that was to be dug up for the road. They found that the tree and the green were surrounded by the construction site fences which had just been erected.

BUT they all felt as one.So when one person climbed into the site, others followed as they knew they would be backed up.

Some felt confident enough to start pushing down the fences surrounding the site. They expected others to join in. And they did join in. ‘Everyone’ joined in.

• The police and security guards were overwhelmed and outnumbered,

• Soon all the fences were down.

• The site was no longer a building site but a free space, ‘common land’.

Psychological outcomes:

Empowerment and joy

• Reactions: excitement and joy

• People talked about empowerment.

• They couldn’t stop smiling.

• They felt a greater confidence in the ability of the campaign to act upon the world rather than accept the world they were given.

Why was it empowering?

• It was an objectification of collective aims to preserve the green as common land

• They found themselves in a different world – a world the crowd had created.

• And they were therefore now different people: empowered people who shared that joy with other direct activists.

But from the outside, to those who seek to protect or gain from the status quo, it looks different: chaos, violence, disorder.

• They don’t recognize that there is a logic, which determines the limits of crowd behaviour, which is based on participants’ shared social identity

• This is why they refer to the madness, the delusions, and the irrational emotionality of the crowd.

Watts 1965

The distorted perception comes from the social location of the critical observer – outside the crowd.

But the fear it expresses is based on a political reality .

Watts 1965

Social change as ‘madness’

The ideological view of the crowd as a mad, dangerous and irrational entity arose in the nineteenth century to make sense of a situation in which the existing order was under threat.

Though most crowds are not revolutionary, crowds are nevertheless historically the form through which subordinate classes bring about social change...

It is therefore inevitable, perhaps, that those who seek to defend existing social relations will recognize in the crowd their potential nemesis.

The power and emotion of the crowd:

Conclusion

The very reason that people are committed to and and so emotional in crowds is because of the ability of crowds to extend our ability to enact (objectify) ourselves

• 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)