The Psychology of Crowd Dynamics

The Psychology of Crowd Dynamics
Stephen Reicher
School of Psychology University of St. Andrews

Address for correspondence: Stephen Reicher, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland. KY 16 9QS. Tel.: +44 (0) 1334 463057. Fax.: +44 (0) 1334 462072. E-mail: sdr@st-andrews.ac.uk

The challenge of crowd psychology

Crowds are the elephant man of the social sciences. They are viewed as something strange, something pathological, something monstrous. At the same time they are viewed with awe and with fascination. However, above all, they are considered to be something apart. We may choose to go and view them occasionally as a distraction from the business of everyday life, but they are separate from that business and tell us little or nothing about normal social and psychological realities . Such an attitude is reflected in the remarkable paucity of psychological research on crowd processes and the fact that it is all but ignored by the dominant paradigms in social psychology. The second edition of The Handbook of Social Cognition (Wyer & Srull, 1994) has no entry in the index under ‘crowd’. Indeed, within a discipline that often views literature from a previous decade as hopelessly outdated, the little reference that is made to such research still tends to focus on Gustave Le Bon’s work from a previous century (Le Bon, 1895). As we shall shortly see, it is most clearly reflected in the content of Le Bon’s research and that of his followers. It was Le Bon, in terms of his theories if not his practices, who divorced crowds from their social context. His theory assumed that crowd participaton extinguishes our normal psychological capacities and reveal a primal nature which is usually well hidden from view. It was he who, with typical Victorian gusto, consigned crowds to the realms of a social scientific theatre of curiosities (cf. Reicher, 1996a; Reicher & Potter, 1985).

The aim of this chapter above all else is to free crowd psychology from being imprisoned at the margins and to restore it to its rightful place at the centre of social scientific enquiry and, more specifically, of social psychological thought. As I have previously argued (Reicher, 1982, 1987) one of the more remarkable features of traditional crowd psychology is that it has tended to constitute a theory without a referent. Rather than starting from a set of phenomena that are in need of explanation, a set of explanations were elaborated in order to underpin certain ideological presuppositions about the crowd - or at least the suppositions of gentleman observers who viewed the masses with alarm from the outside. To them, crowds seemed anonymous, their actions inherently destructive and random, their reasons unfathomable. However, these hostile and external observers never took care to investigate the patterns of crowd action and the conceptions of crowd members to see if their suppositions were warranted. If one did - and there is a growing literature by historians and social scientists that does (e.g. Feagin & Hahn, 1973; Krantz, 1988; Rude, 1964; Williams, 1986) - then two things would become immediately apparent. The first is that crowd action is patterned in such a way as to reflect existing cultures and societies. Perhaps the classic example of this remains E.P. Thompson’s study of eighteenth century food riots in England (Thompson, 1971; 1991).
Of all examples of crowd action, one might at first think of food riots as a domain in which social analysis has least to offer. Surely starving people are simply motivated by a biological need to eat, to grab - by force if necessary - whatever food is available, and to make off with it. And yet, as Thompson notes, people are often passive in the face of starvation and protests are comparatively rare. When they do occur, food riots are far from inchoate explosions. In an analysis of several hundred such riots in England around the turn of the 19th century, Thompson shows how riots had a characteristic pattern both in terms of how they started and how people behaved within them. Moreover, these patterns reflected collective belief systems. Thus the riots occurred in the context of a shift from feudal to market based economies. These were matched by different ‘moral economies’. For the one, produce was meant to be sold locally and, for the other, produce was legitimately sold where it fetched the highest price. Riots generally started when grain was being transported to a distant market and the populace attempted to enforce their moral economy against that of the merchants. Events then unfolded in a way that reflected localist beliefs: grain was sold at a popular price and the money - sometimes even the grain sacks - were handed back to the merchants. In short, and in complete contrast to prevalent visions of anarchy, the food riot demonstrates how crowd action is shaped by ideology and social structure.

The second obvious feature of crowd phenomena is that they are not only shaped by society but that they in turn bring about social change. Indeed the changes wrought by crowds exist at three levels. There is change in the ways that crowd members see themselves as social actors. Autobiographies and studies of activists (e.g. Biko, 1988; Burns, 1990; Cluster, 1979; Haley, 1980, Teske, 1997) repeatedly show that people do not enter collective movements with fully fledged movement ideologies but that they develop their understanding of society and who they are within it as a consequence of participation. Crowds and collective action also leads to changes in the collective ideologies themselves. Indeed, as Eyerman and Jamison (1991) argue, the actions of social movements “are bearers of new ideas, and have often been the sources of scientific theories and of whole scientific fields, as well as new political and social identities” (p. 3). To take but one example, the rise of environmental science, of ‘green’ sensibilities and ‘green’ identities cannot be understood outside the actions of anti-nuclear activists, roads protestors and other collective acts of opposition. Finally, crowd action can bring about the entire restructuring of society. Just over a decade ago, such a point may have required more justification when the role of the sans-culottes in the French revolution of 1789 (Rude, 1959) or of the July day crowds in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 were only historical memories. However since the transformations in Eastern Europe - whether through the peaceful mass demonstrations of Czechoslovakia’s ‘velvet revolution’, the confrontational demonstrations in East Germany, or the violent clashes between Romanian crowds and state forces in Timisoara and elsewhere (cf. De Rudder, 1989/90; Garton Ash, 1990), the claim hardly needs to be laboured.

Putting the two features together, it should be clear that, in simultaneously encompassing social determination and social change, crowd action reflects what is possibly the central paradox of human action. Characteristically, even when this paradox constitutes the focus of enquiry, these twin facets of the human condition are studied in relation to different phenomena. However both come together in the crowd. It follows both that the crowd provides a privileged arena in which to study social (psychological) processes and also that any adequate explanation of the crowd must take us a long way towards understanding the general bases of human social behaviour.

As well as delineating the extent of the challenge, even such a brief account as that provided above suggests the nature of the tools which are necessary to meet it. Thompson’s analysis suggests that the impact of structural and ideological factors upon action is achieved through actors collective understanding of their position as social subjects. Conversely, the work on social change indicates that it is as social subjects that people act collectively in ways that bring about transformations - including in the way they understand their own position. In other words, the psychological processes which relate society to crowd action are those of identity. If we are to understand the nature of crowd action we therefore need a model of identity which explains both how society structures identity and how identity organises action. Failure to do the former will lead to a desocialised crowd psychology, while failure to do the latter will lead to an abstracted social theory. In either case, it will be impossible to complete the cycle of crowd dynamics whereby social factors affect identity which organises action which then reflects back upon society - and so on.

When one measures the actual performance of traditional crowd psychology against the size of this challenge the results are sorry indeed. The failure has not been to explain either social change or social determination at the expense of the other but to ignore - no, to deny - both. The theoretical underpinning of this denial, which has unfortunately been bequeathed to much of social psychology in general, is a theoretical model of the self which writes society out of the picture and which therefore cannot address how it either shapes or is shaped by actors and their actions. This neglect is hardly accidental. It reflects the concerns which led crowds to become a focus of explanation. In order to understand the deficits of classical crowd theory and how to transcend them it is necessary to start by considering the context in which crowd psychology was born.