Crowd Behavior
There have been a number of studies on how and why crowds behave as they do. Keep in mind that a crowd at a bus stop that gets on the bus does not necessarily qualify as having participated in collective behavior because of how little time they were together and their purpose. Although, a crowd coming together to celebrate the big win of the football team does constitute collective behavior, so purpose is a key element to collective behavior.
Gustav Le Bon (1841-1931) was a French Social Psychologist who studied crowds in his work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon believed that when a crowd came together, their individual conscious merges into one large collective conscious. Though his idea proved not to be true, it helped other social scientists study the ways in which crowds and the people who comprise them are motivated to act. LeBon’s theory was called Contagion Theory.
Contagion Theory claimed that in a crowd, people get caught up in the collective mind of the crowd and evade personal responsibility for their actions.
Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian (1993) developed Emergent-Norm Theory and wrote a book about crowd behavior. They believe that events and emotions develop within the crowd while they are together. For example, if a fight broke out in a crowd, other people who had nothing to do with the original fight might end up getting involved.
The Emergent-Norm Theory claims that as crowds form and people interact, new norms develop in the crowd and facilitate certain actions.
To understand crowds and how they function, you need to think about them in terms of three questions:
How did the crowd come to be a crowd?
How does the crowd compare or contrast to other crowds?
Fundamentally, what is the crowd doing together or what did they do?
A conventional crowd is a crowd that gathers for a typical event that is more routine in nature. Examples include:
• A symphony concert
• A sports event
• A school play
An expressive crowd is a crowd gathered to express an emotion. Examples include:
• A large funeral
• The 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights
• 9-11 Memorial Services
Solidaristic crowds are crowds that gather as an act of social unity. Examples include:
• a breast cancer awareness event
• a gay rights parade
• a political rally in support of a candidate
These three types of crowds are safe, non-violent, and mostly predictable in terms of what they accomplish. Some could become violent, but not all of them. Violence might happen with one of these crowds when a large number of fans exit an arena after their team won or lost. A violent crowd is called an acting crowd.
Acting crowds engage in aggressive (and sometimes violent) behavior to achieve their objective
In that same scenerio, if a crowd sees the police arresting another fan, their emotions might become more anger-centered and they might collectively move against the police. The fact that the other fan may have been robbing someone at knife point may or may not matter if the others perceive an injustice or overbearing police action. Generally speaking, acting crowds are more dangerous that other crowds. Two types of acting crowds are mobs and riots.
Mobs are emotional crowds ready to use violence for a specific purpose
Riots are large numbers of people who act violently in protest against some authority or action of others (typically governmental or corporate authority).
The purpose behind a mob is usually very specific. They tend to have leaders or instigators and will usually end when the goal is reached. An example of a mob is a lynch mob coming after an accused criminal.
Riots differ from mobs because they are usually provoked by some sort of perceived social injustice, although not all participants engage because of the original cause. Some get caught up in looting or violence that has nothing to do with the original cause. Fans whose team won or lost, employees laid off from work, neighbors who are angry about a police action, and other scenarios are connected to typical riots.
The 1991 Los Angeles Riots began after some white police officers were acquitted of charges of police brutality against a black man. These riots quickly became commodity riots, where the original issue is forgotten as local people loot businesses and stores for commodities like food and other items. In the U.S., commodity riots have been the norm since about the 1960s. Prior to that, property damage and violence against police were the norm.
