Forget What You Think You Know About Crowd Behavior

“There’s nothing like a riot to bring out the amateur
psychologist in all of us,” Michael Bond
writes in Aeon. He’s referring to the idea that people
lose their reason, even their individual identities, in a crowd—a
notion that thrives in punditry and pop culture even as
sociologists and psychologists keep giving us reasons to believe it
isn’t true. Reviewing the research, Bond makes the case “not only
that mindless irrationality is rare within crowds, but also that
co-operation and altruism are the norm when lives are at
stake.”

At one point, Bond goes further than Reason‘s
oft-made
point that crowds during
disasters generally stay
calm and
do not panic, arguing that crowds can be too calm:

When the hijacked planes hit the World Trade
Center towers in New York on 11 September 2001, most of those
inside procrastinated rather than heading for the nearest exit.
Even those who managed to escape waited an average of six minutes
before moving to the stairs. Some hung around for half an hour,
awaiting more information, collecting things to take with them,
going to the bathroom, finishing emails, or making phone
calls.

Likewise, say researchers, passengers have died in accidents
because they just didn’t try to get out. Take the aircraft fire at
Manchester airport in the UK on 22 August 1985, when 55 people died
because they stayed in their seats amid the flames. John Leach, who
studies disaster psychology at the University of Oslo, says a
shared state of bewilderment might be to blame. Contrary to popular
belief that crowds always panic in emergencies, large groups mill
around longer than small groups since it takes them more time to
come up with a plan.

And in a piece of good news, some officials—not all, alas—are
starting to take this social science into account when they try to
police crowds:

[Clifford] Stott and his
collaborators presented their research to the Portuguese Public
Security Police (PSP) before the European football championships,
scheduled for Portugal for the first time in 2004. They advised the
PSP to drop the riot-squad tactics used at most previous
tournaments in favour of a lower-profile, firm-but-friendly
approach. The Portuguese were receptive. They developed a training
programme to ensure that all PSP officers understood the theory and
how to translate it into non-confrontational policing. The result
was an almost complete absence of disorder at England games during
Euro 2004.

Today, the social identity model of crowd behaviour is the
framework by which all Union of European Football Associations
(UEFA) matches in Europe are policed—though in Russia and in
eastern Europe it is still only sporadically applied.

Read the rest
here.

Bonus link: This isn’t
the first time we’ve noted Bond’s writing on this subject.