The Death of Duggan

People in crowds become deindividuated because they are anonymous and therefore lose rational and conscious control of their behaviour. Critically assess this claim with reference to the scientific literature on crowd psychology.

This claim is flawed for several reasons.

The concept of deindividuation was expanded upon back in the 19^th century by Gustave Le Bon (1895.) He theorised that crowds allow a person to ignore their moral responsibilities since individuality, thereby individual responsibility, is weakened and negated in such an environment. The crowd environment also allows individuals to express deeply repressed and primitive parts of their own psychology – this partly explains why crowds can behave so heroically and/or violently on a large scale. Le Bon’s interpretation was that this behaviour was an emergent and collective phenomenon. Festinger et al. (1952) expanded upon Le Bon’s theories of deindividuation by proposing that the crowd environment affected the individual’s moral and behavioural restraints.

While classical crowd theory is a useful and insightful tool that is still studied today, it fails to paint a full picture of why people behave how they do in a crowd. It especially disregards the psychology of the individual and how much individuals can differ from one another and how these differences can shape crowd psychology.

One perspective that is critical of deindividuation is something called convergence theory. It argues that groups (especially crowds) act not because unconscious ‘collective’ behaviour emerges as Le Bon (1895) suggests, but because individuals with similar goals, ambitions, beliefs, desires, etc converge with one another (Hoeffer, 1951.) For example, Crusaders behaved as they did because of their belief systems, aims, ambitions and individual goals converged with one another, rather than the Crusaders’ violence being a product of deindividuation or them being together. This means convergence theory is highly individualistic in stark contrast to classical theory. Social scientists and researchers can show how apparent this phenomenon of convergence can be. For example, Arms & Russell (1997) found that there was a statistically significant relationship between being a young man, participating in sports and participating in riots (r(75) = -.36, p < .005.) Walsh et al. (1995) discovered that people who join cults tend to be young, higher in trait neuroticism and higher in trait openness than a random sample population with various control factors accounted for. These findings reiterate the idea that the individual’s psychology influences group selection and crowd behaviour, rather than group dynamics changing the behaviour of the individual (as strongly suggested in classical theory.)

However, one of convergence theory’s shortcomings is its assumption that individuals maintain their psychological integrity in a crowd scenario (Kazdin, 2000.) This is a phenomenon that occurs in psychology called the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977.) This is a way of saying that psychologists can overestimate the influence an individual can have in a group. Yet in order to understand crowd psychology more comprehensively, we need to critically assess the claim we are investigating and look at more perspectives.

Another perspective that is critical of deindividuation is social identity theory. It is based on the well-articulated Social Identity Model (SIM.) This theory a ‘middle way’ between classical and emergent theory and takes cues from both. It suggests that crowd psychology and behaviour is based on a person’s social identity i.e., their many group identities and how they categorise themselves e.g., black, a victim, unlucky, male, etc. It is based on these self-categorisations and self-labels that collective actions of a crowd emerge. Because members of a crowd feel similarly about themselves and their circumstances, meaningful and non-random behaviours occur. (Drury & Stott, 2016.)

The idea that social identity is a basis for analysing crowd behaviour has scientific weight behind it. Social identity theory also offers insights into why crowds behave as they can. This is partly because social identity theory relies on very different methodologies to prior schools of thought. Classical theory is generally philosophical and psychoanalytical (Jung, 1978) and convergence theory tends to be quantitative (numbers-based.) Social identity theory relies much more on qualitative data sources.

Stott et al. (2017) analysed the 2011 England riots from a social identity perspective by pointing to two different cases: Tottenham on August 6^th and Hackney on August 8^th. They came to several conclusions. 

• Firstly, that explanations resorting to consumerist ideology or mere ‘anti-police grievances’ (Stott et al., 2017) were insufficient. They were necessary but not causal factors. This aligned with criticisms at other studies into these riots (Akram, 2014; Ball & Drury, 2012.) 

• Secondly, they believed the shooting of Mark Duggan acted as a ‘flashpoint’ for the beginning of the riots. This gives credence to Waddington’s et al. (1989) flashpoint theory.

• Thirdly, they found patterns of looting and damage occurred. It was not completely random. Shops that were perceived to be owned by or provide for ‘insiders’ or ‘victims’ were largely left alone and sometimes defended from other rioters. This was particularly observable in Tottenham. This finding is further evidence against classical crowd theory’s perspective of deindividuation and disinhibition. It also weighs against the claim that crowd members behave irrationally and unconsciously.

The social identity perspective also allowed Stott et al. to expand upon why the rioters looted, damaged property and attacked officers. In their comprehensive analysis, they thought the rioters’ self-categorisation as ‘victims’ of police mismanagement and being treated unfairly by authorities was a motivator of the riots, systematic looting, methodical protesting and targeted action against police officers. This also contributed to an ‘insider-outsider’ dynamic, a ‘them-and-us’ dynamic of interaction between the rioters and authorities. Again, the shooting of Mark Duggan and following incident at Tottenham High Road Police Station acted as ‘flashpoints’ for the psychological and social changes within individuals. The researchers also pointed out that rioters were motivated to avenge the injustices they felt they had collectively experienced, partly due to police mismanagement. Because the police didn’t respond to attempts at peaceful dialogue 24 – 48 hours after Duggan’s death, people who argued for a more violent response seemed to have a stronger argument than those who leaned towards dialogue with authorities. As time passed and dialogue stalled, the anger turned into violence.These insights seem to undermine the argument that these crowd members were behaving irrationally and unconsciously. They were acting emotionally, but also acting socially, politically, strategically and psychologically.

References

Akram, S. (2014). ‘Recognising the 2011 United Kingdom Riots as Political Protest: A Theoretical Framework Based on Agency, Habitus and the Preconscious’. British Journal of Criminology, 54, 375–92.

Arms, R., & Russell, G. (1997). Impulsivity, fight history, and camaraderie as predictors of a willingness to escalate a disturbance. Current Psychology, 15(4), 279-285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-997-1005-0

Ball, R., & Drury, J. (2012). ‘Representing the Riots: The (Mis)use of Statistics to Sustain Ideological Explanation’. Radical Statistics, 106. 4–21.

Clifford, S., Drury, J., & Reicher, S. (2017). On the Role of a Social Identity Analysis in Articulating Structure and Collective Action: The 2011 Riots in Tottenham and Hackney. The British Journal of Criminology, 57(4), 964–981. https://doi-org.ezproxy.keele.ac.uk/10.1093/bjc/azw036

Festinger, L., Pepitone, A., & Newcomb, T. (1952). Some consequences of de-individuation in a group. The Journal of Abnormal And Social Psychology, 47(2, Suppl), 382-389. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0057906

Hoffer, E. (1951). The true believer. Harper & Row.

Jung, C., & Franz, M. (1978). Man and his symbols. Pan Books.

Kazdin, A. (2000). Encyclopedia of psychology. American Psychological Association.

Le Bon, G. (2021). The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. S.l. Hansebooks.

Ross, L. (1977). The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process. Stanford University Press.

Stott, C., & Drury, J. (2016). Contemporary understanding of riots: Classical crowd psychology, ideology and the social identity approach. Public Understanding Of Science, 26(1), 2-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662516639872

Waddington, D., Jones, K., & Critcher, C. (1989). Flashpoints: Studies in Public Disorder. Routledge.

Walsh, Y., Russell, R., & Wells, P. (1995). The personality of ex-cult members. Personality And Individual Differences, 19(3), 339-344. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(95)00074-g