Underlying Psychological Processes

Early theories of crowd behavior hypothesized that unruly crowds were
made up of criminals or the mentally deficient. 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. Le Bon provided a more psychological
analysis of crowd behavior, recognizing that even people of high intelligence
could become members of an unruly crowd. He believed that
crowds transform people, obliterating their normal abilities to be rational
and putting them in a hypnotic, highly suggestible state. Le Bon disapproved
of crowd behavior in all forms. Consequently, in his book he painted
an extremely negative picture of crowd behavior.

Modern social psychological research suggests that neither of these early
viewpoints is a good description of the psychological forces underlying
crowd behavior. Experimental research has determined that almost any individual
could be influenced to behave in uncharacteristic ways under the
right circumstances. Le Bon’s perspective has also been greatly refined.
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. 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. Groups such as one’s family,
school, or religion can all provide positive sources of identity.

Under some circumstances, crowds can become a source of identity as
well. 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.
Being in a crowd is likely to lead to deindividuation for a number of reasons.
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. Crowds also focus attention away from the
self, so one’s own values and internal standards become less influential.
Thus, in line with social identity theory, deindividuation leads someone to
become focused on social identity rather than individual identity. When social
identity is salient to an individual, that person becomes particularly susceptible
to social influence. 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. In the shorttime frame of many crowd gatherings, the norm becomes whatever everyone
else is doing.

Being 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. Often crowds do not engage in collective
behavior at all. 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.
Eugen 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. During the individual phase, people move
freely about. At these times, individuals are not particularly aware of their
membership in a crowd and are not particularly influenced by those around
them. 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.

During this phase, the group norms heavily influence each individual’s
behavior. Crowds typically alternate between these two phases, sometimes
acting collectively, sometimes individually. For example, at a sporting
event, fans are sometimes talking to their friends about topics of individual
interest. However, when points are scored by the home team, the crowd responds
collectively, as part of social group. At these moments spectators are
not responding as individuals but as members of the social group, “fans.”
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 for behavior that become established among the group. Because these factors
vary considerably from group to group, crowds cannot be characterized
as wholly negative or uniformly simplistic, as Le Bon described them.