THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYReicher and Haslam to interpret their prison findings; see p.243). In 2009,
Drury interviewed 21 people who’d been caught up in real-life emergen-
cies, including the crush at Sheffield’s Hillsborough football stadium, the
Harrods bomb of 1983, and the overcrowding at the Fatboy Slim party on
Brighton beach in 2002. He found that the same twelve participants who
said the crowd in each case was united with a sense of a shared fate also
tended to be the ones to report that they’d seen and experienced people
helping others, including strangers, and that they’d seen signs of order-
liness, such as people queuing to escape. The lesson seems to be that a
collective mentality can, in the right context, be a force for good.
MASS HYSTERIA
Mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness can last for days, weeks or
even months at a time. It’s defined by the exhibition of odd behaviour
and/or physical or psychological symptoms, such as dizziness or nausea,
in more than one person and in the absence of any identifiable organic
cause. There are some striking historical examples. In 1374 along the river
Rhine and at Strasbourg in 1518, hundreds of people were overcome by a
kind of dancing plague – many of them literally danced and danced for
During a football match at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium in 1989, ninety-six
Liverpool supporters died after being crushed against a pitch-side barrier. Many
fans went to the assistance of the injured. Police control of the event was heavily
criticized, as was The Sun newspaper for its negative and inaccurate reporting of
the Liverpool fans’ behaviour.