DANGEROUS MOBS VS. WISE CROWDSnotoriety of the mythical version of the Kitty Genovese story has rein-
forced the already powerful notion that crowds are inherently dangerous
and bad, suppressing interest in research on the potentially positive
aspects of group behaviour.
Bucking this trend is Mark Levine, a social psychologist at Lancaster
University. He’s used CCTV footage and a cleverly contrived lab situation
to show that people in a larger group are actually more likely to help a
victim, not less, if they and the other group members all belong to the
same social category as the victim. So, for example, the more people a
bystander female is with, the more likely she is to intervene and help
another woman being assaulted – as long, that is, as her companions
are female too. Levine calls this the “responsive bystander effect” and it
reinforces the importance of shared social identity. Again, the message
seems to be that people bonded by a common identity can sometimes act
more altruistically than they otherwise would.
Panic
Surging, screaming, stampeding and everyone for themselves: this is
what many people think of when they imagine large crowds of people in
an emergency situation. It’s certainly the view that was held for much of
the twentieth century by advocates of the popular panic model of crowd
responses to emergencies. Traditional media reports of disasters have
tended to reinforce this perspective. Consider coverage of the infamous
stampede at the 1979 Who concert in Cincinnati, which left several people
dead. “Crowds capable of developing own personalities, says expert” was
the headline in The Cincinnati Enquirer. The ensuing report noted that
people were “horrified and disgusted” by the news that eleven people
had been “trampled to death”. A Time magazine article, “The Stampede
to Tragedy”, reported that one Cincinnati editor had compared children
in the audience to “animals”.
It’s because of the influence of the panic model that emergency exits
are often designed to be as wide as possible, and safety stewards some-
times use codes in a fire evacuation so that the crowd doesn’t realize
what’s happening and run amok. However, new research is once again
contradicting the traditional view. John Drury at Sussex University
argues that the historical record shows that panic is actually extraordi-
narily rare and that people often stop to help each other. Drury’s theory
is that helping behaviour is more likely to emerge when people in an
emergency feel a sense of shared identity (this is the same model used by