The Violent Crowd

Violent and destructive acts are among the most studied forms of crowd behavior.
Many historical examples, from the French Revolution of 1789 to the
Los Angeles riots of 1992, attest to the destructive power of crowds. A crowd
of deindividuated people will not become violent, however, unless a group
normof violence becomes established. In riots, for example, there is usually
an identifiable precipitating event (for example, one person smashing a
window) that introduces a norm of violence. If a critical mass of people immediately
follows suit, a riot ensues. Other crowds, such as lynch mobs, have
the norm of violence previously established by their culture or by the
group’s previous actions.

Further, there is some evidence to suggest that the way in which a crowd
of people is viewed by authorities can escalate crowd conflicts. For example,
in 1998, European psychologists Clifford Stott and Stephen Reicher interviewed
police officers involved with controlling a riot in Great Britain. Their
analysis revealed that while police officers recognize that crowds contain
subgroups of more dangerous or less dangerous members, they tend to treat
all group members as potentially dangerous. The police officers’ negative
expectations often translate into combative behavior toward all crowd members.
By acting on their negative expectations, authority figures often elicit
the very behaviors they hope to prevent. This often leads to increased violence
and conflict escalation.

Much evidence suggests that there is a direct relationship between the degree
of deindividuation and the extremity of a crowd’s actions. For example,
in 1986, Brian Mullen examined newspaper accounts of sixty lynchings occurring
in the first half of the twentieth century. His analysis revealed that
the more people in the mob, the more violent and vicious was the event.
Similarly, Leon Mann found in his analysis of twenty-one cases of threatened
suicides that crowds watching were more likely to engage in crowd baiting
(encouraging the person to jump from a ledge or bridge) when crowds were
large and when it was dark. On a more mundane level, sports players are
more aggressive when wearing identical uniforms than when dressed in
their own clothes. Any factor that increases anonymity seems to increase
deindividuation and increase the power of social identity and thus increases
the likelihood of extreme behavior.

In South Africa, psychological research on these phenomena has been
presented in murder trials. People being tried for murder have argued that
these psychological principles help explain their antisocial behavior. The
use of psychological research findings for these purposes has sparked a
great deal of controversy in the field.