Crowd Behaviour
How might we best explain crowd behaviour?
(2013 Exam Question)
People are likely to act in bizarre ways in a crowd compared to as an individual. A crowd can be defined as a set of individuals who share a common social identification of themselves in terms of that crowd. Crowd members should also share common goals and act in a coherent member (Reicher, 2008). There have been extensive amounts of research into crowd psychology, investigating the apparent causes and reasons for such behaviour to occur. Many different theories exist to attempt to explain why people fall into this interesting state of social influence when they are in crowds. This essay will attempt to investigate how we might best explain crowd behaviour.
Le Bon’s (1896) early attempt to explain this phenomenon suggested that crowd behaviours are pathological and abnormal, where people are reduced to a primitive or instinctive mode of behaviour. This theory proposes that feelings of anonymity cause people in a crowd to lose their sense of self and responsibility and act in ways that stem from a ‘group mind’. Through this group mind people are freed from social norms and natural animal instincts are released causing riots and irrational violence. However, since the initial suggestion of the ‘group mind’, this theory has been largely rejected. The main reasoning for this being that the theory does not acknowledge the importance of power in crowd behaviours, which appears to be a key factor in collective behaviour.
One speculation that remains important from Le Bon’s group mind theory is that the feeling of crowd anonymity appears to be influential in creating various subsequent theories to explain crowd behaviour, such as the theory of deindividuation. However, the rejection of the group mind does not mean that we should then reject the study of group processes as groups have distinctive properties from individual behaviour. Instead, we should begin to look at group processes with a different
(2013 Exam Question)
People are likely to act in bizarre ways in a crowd compared to as an individual. A crowd can be defined as a set of individuals who share a common social identification of themselves in terms of that crowd. Crowd members should also share common goals and act in a coherent member (Reicher, 2008). There have been extensive amounts of research into crowd psychology, investigating the apparent causes and reasons for such behaviour to occur. Many different theories exist to attempt to explain why people fall into this interesting state of social influence when they are in crowds. This essay will attempt to investigate how we might best explain crowd behaviour.
Le Bon’s (1896) early attempt to explain this phenomenon suggested that crowd behaviours are pathological and abnormal, where people are reduced to a primitive or instinctive mode of behaviour. This theory proposes that feelings of anonymity cause people in a crowd to lose their sense of self and responsibility and act in ways that stem from a ‘group mind’. Through this group mind people are freed from social norms and natural animal instincts are released causing riots and irrational violence. However, since the initial suggestion of the ‘group mind’, this theory has been largely rejected. The main reasoning for this being that the theory does not acknowledge the importance of power in crowd behaviours, which appears to be a key factor in collective behaviour.
One speculation that remains important from Le Bon’s group mind theory is that the feeling of crowd anonymity appears to be influential in creating various subsequent theories to explain crowd behaviour, such as the theory of deindividuation. However, the rejection of the group mind does not mean that we should then reject the study of group processes as groups have distinctive properties from individual behaviour. Instead, we should begin to look at group processes with a different
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