The way in which individuals behave in a crowd has been a subject of increasing attention. The behaviors that members of a crowd perform will thus depend upon how strongly the crowd becomes a source of social identity and the norms At these moments spectators are not responding as individuals but as members of the social group, "fans." However, when points are scored by the home team, the crowd responds collectively, as part of social group. For example, at a sporting event, fans are sometimes talking to their friends about topics of individual interest. Crowds typically alternate between these two phases, sometimes acting collectively, sometimes individually. During this phase, the group norms heavily influence each individual's behavior. In the conforming phase, however, individuals in a crowd are highly aware of the group of which they are a part, and they show high levels of conformity. At these times, individuals are not particularly aware of their membership in a crowd and are not particularly influenced by those around them. During the individual phase, people move freely about. For example, on most city streets, pedestrians walking and milling about do not consider themselves to be part of a group and do not draw a sense of identity from the people around them.Įugen Tarnow noted that these wide variations in the effect of crowds on individuals can be best understood by identifying two phases, an individual phase and a conforming phase. Often crowds do not engage in collective behavior at all. In the short time frame of many crowd gatherings, the norm becomes whatever everyone else is doing.īeing amid a group of people, however, does not always lead one to become deindividuated, nor does it always lead to the ascendancy of social identity over individual identity. Group norms, or a group's standards and expectations regarding appropriate behavior, become especially important, and the individual is likely to conform strictly to those norms. When social identity is salient to an individual, that person becomes particularly susceptible to social influence. Thus, in line with social identity theory, deindividuation leads someone to become focused on social identity rather than individual identity. Crowds also focus attention away from the self, so one's own values and internal standards become less influential. First, crowds lead individuals to feel less accountable for their actions the individual is less likely to be singled out and feels less personally responsible for any act the crowd commits. Being in a crowd is likely to lead to deindividuation for a number of reasons. A key psychological mechanism through which crowds become a source of identity is deindividuation, the loss of a person's sense of identity and weakening of inhibitions, which occurs only in the presence of others. Under some circumstances, crowds can become a source of identity as well. Groups such as one's family, school, or religion can all provide positive sources of identity. Social identity theory, originally developed by European psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970's, posits that the individual derives an important part of his or her sense of identity from the groups to which he or she belongs. Rather than relying on Le Bon's concepts of mass hypnosis and loss of rationality, modern researchers draw primarily from social identity theory to help explain crowd behavior. Le Bon's perspective has also been greatly refined. Experimental research has determined that almost any individual could be influenced to behave in uncharacteristic ways under the right circumstances. Modern social psychological research suggests that neither of these early viewpoints is a good description of the psychological forces underlying crowd behavior. Consequently, in his book he painted an extremely negative picture of crowd behavior. Le Bon disapproved of crowd behavior in all forms. He believed that crowds transform people, obliterating their normal abilities to be rational and putting them in a hypnotic, highly suggestible state. Le Bon provided a more psychological analysis of crowd behavior, recognizing that even people of high intelligence could become members of an unruly crowd. Proponents of this perspective assumed that crowd behavior could be explained by the makeup of the individual personalities of people in the crowd and that certain kinds of people were more likely to be found in a crowd. Early theories of crowd behavior hypothesized that unruly crowds were made up of criminals or the mentally deficient.
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