The two accounts
Both are trying to explain the same thing: why people in crowds sometimes do what they would not do alone. They locate the explanation in different places, and that is what makes them testable against each other.
A generic deindividuation account
Being one of many reduces attention to the self and to personal standards. Anonymity, arousal and the sheer size of the crowd loosen the ordinary restraints on behaviour, so what emerges is behaviour that is less regulated than usual.
What follows: action should rise with anonymity, and because the restraint that has been lost was general, the resulting behaviour should be relatively undirected - spread across whatever targets happen to be to hand. The cause sits inside the crowd member.
The elaborated social identity model
People in a crowd do not lose an identity, they act in terms of one they share. A shared identity brings its own norms about what is and is not acceptable, and those norms come with limits as well as licence.
What follows: action should be patterned - aimed at some targets and withheld from others, sometimes actively policed by the crowd itself. And because a shared identity can be created by how a crowd is treated, the policing is part of what the crowd becomes rather than only a response to it. The cause sits in the relationship between the crowd and the people policing it.
The laboratory
Marlow Bridge, a Saturday afternoon. Around two thousand people have come to a demonstration about the closure of the river crossing. Six recognisable sections of the crowd are present, including a handful who arrived expecting a confrontation. Set the afternoon up and see what the model produces.
Key terms
- Deindividuation
- An account in which being submerged in a crowd loosens self-regulation, so that behaviour becomes less constrained.
- Elaborated social identity model
- An account in which crowd action follows from a shared social identity, and is patterned by what that identity makes legitimate.
- Patterning
- Whether action concentrates on particular targets or spreads across all of them. It is where the two accounts predict differently.
- Legitimacy
- How the crowd reads the treatment it is receiving. Here it is a setting you choose, not a verdict the activity reaches.
Set the afternoon up
Two things are reported: how many of the six sections took part, and how concentrated the action was across four possible targets.
What the afternoon produced
Who took part, section by section
| Section of the crowd | Baseline | This set-up | Total | Took part? |
|---|
Baselines are invented for teaching. A section takes part when its total reaches 0.60. "Took part" means joining the collective action - standing the line, refusing to move, chanting - and not necessarily violence.
What each account is criticised for
Neither account explains every crowd event well.
Against the deindividuation account
- The evidence is thinner than the textbook suggests. Reviews of the experimental literature have repeatedly found the predicted effects of anonymity and group immersion to be small and inconsistent.
- It predicts the wrong shape. Crowd action is usually limited: particular targets are attacked and others nearby are conspicuously left alone, sometimes protected by the crowd. A loss of restraint does not obviously explain restraint.
- Anonymity does not simply disinhibit. A substantial body of work finds that anonymity increases conformity to whatever norm is salient - which can be helpfulness, order or silence as easily as aggression.
- It has a politics. Locating the cause inside the crowd member makes the crowd the thing to be explained and the policing merely the response to it, which is a convenient division of labour for whoever did the policing.
Against the elaborated social identity model
- Much of the evidence is retrospective. Detailed accounts of particular events, reconstructed afterwards from interviews and records, are hard to falsify and hard to aggregate.
- "The norm" can be read off the outcome. If whatever the crowd did is explained as the norm it shared, the account risks describing rather than predicting - unless the norm is specified in advance, which is difficult.
- Not all crowd action is patterned. Some events really do involve widespread, unfocused destruction, and an account built on selectivity has to work harder there.
- It can under-describe what a crowd contains. Treating the crowd as one identity risks losing the sections within it that disagreed, left, or tried to stop what was happening.
- It also has a politics. Locating the cause in the relationship makes policing a candidate cause, which is a substantive claim and not a neutral one.
Challenge - a different event
A fictional summer night in a different fictional town: a music event on Calder Green overran, the power was cut at midnight and several thousand people were moved off the field. Five things were observed. For each, say which account handles it better.
What this demonstrates
Both accounts can predict a lot of action on the same afternoon. They disagree about its shape. Deindividuation expects behaviour to become less discriminating as people become less identifiable; the elaborated social identity account expects it to stay targeted, and expects indiscriminate policing to bring separate parts of a crowd under one shared category. Which pattern appears is what tells them apart.
For teaching elsewhere: take this activity as one self-contained block of HTML, on the clipboard or as a file. Either way it is styled so that it will not disturb the page you put it into.