Social and Critical Psychology

Crowd Behaviour Laboratory: Deindividuation and ESIM

One fictional afternoon on Marlow Bridge, set up five different ways. A generic deindividuation account asks how much a crowd does. The elaborated social identity model asks what it does, to whom, and who joined in - and answers differently depending on how the crowd was policed.

Fictional event, model-implied numbers - Marlow Bridge exists only here, and no real incident, policing operation or dataset is described

Learning objective

By the end you should be able to say how deindividuation and the elaborated social identity model differ about the patterning of crowd action, and where each locates the cause.

About 30 minutes. Nothing is timed and nothing you choose is saved or sent anywhere.

What the numbers here are

The figures come from a simple teaching model, not from any real crowd. Use them to compare what the two accounts predict. Neither account is refuted here, and both have serious critics.

How to use this

  1. Read the two accounts and commit to an answer to the question below.
  2. Set up the afternoon: how the police responded, how the crowd read that response, whether a common category was available, what the norm was, and whether people were identifiable.
  3. Watch the two things the result reports - how many sections of the crowd took part, and how concentrated their action was.
  4. Use the four preset set-ups to reach the contrasts quickly.
  5. Then judge five observations from a different event.

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.

A crowd is pushed back as a single mass, regardless of what any individual was doing. What would you expect to happen next?

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.