

The Intimacy of Crowds - mr_golyadkin
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/crowds-show-us-working-together-at-our-best

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twic
> Thousands took to the streets of London and other English towns in the UK’s
> worst outbreak of civil unrest in a generation. When police finally restored
> order after some six days of violence and vandalism, everyone from the Prime
> Minister David Cameron to newspaper columnists of every political persuasion
> denounced the mindless madness, incredulous that a single killing, horrific
> as it was, could spark the conflagration at hand. The most popular theory
> was that rioters had surrendered their self-awareness and rationality to the
> mentality of the crowd.

The most popular theory? This is the first time i've ever heard of it.

The most popular theory i heard was that a lot of people realised that they
could loot some shops without getting caught. The more people who joined in
the looting, the thinner the police were stretched, and the safer it was to
join in.

~~~
e40
I believe it is subverted anger and perceived injustice that causes these
types of riots. I don't think people think "hey, I can get some free stuff",
but I do think they have the "man, this pisses me off" in mind when they leave
for the gathering.

Look at the Watts riots in the 60's. I think everyone, at this vantage point
in time, believes that was caused by the deplorable conditions there and the
state of civil rights for blacks, and not because people wanted stuff for
free.

The 2007 financial crisis had far ranging effects, and some of them take a
while to percolate down and cause problems. My city is next door to a poorer
one, and the first thing I thought of was, eventually, the crime in my
neighborhood would go up. It took 3 years, but it happened.

~~~
twic
I think injustice fed into these riots, but more indirectly. I don't think
people were driven to rioting by anger at injustice ("man, this pisses me
off"). But i do think that injustice had eroded restraints on their behaviour,
because they no longer felt part of the society which owned the shops ("screw
the rich guys who own this place").

Which was ironic, because the shops looted were almost all in the rioters'
neighbourhoods, and many of them will have been owned, outright or as
franchises, by local people.

I don't know much about the Watts riots, but my impression is that they were
quite different. There, most of the participants were attacking the police or
any white people they came across, rather than looting their own
neighbourhood. The Broadwater Farm and poll tax riots in London were the same
- battles between the authorities and people angry at the authorities. The
2011 riots were quite different.

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gumby
Sadly it's not just the sciences that are grossly misunderstood by the public
(and this misunderstanding exploited by politicians).

I find this quotation in the article the most interesting:

"‘What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the
social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American
citizens,’ it concluded. ‘Rather than rejecting the American system, they were
anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.’"

We see this time and again: demonstration and revolt come from those who have
something to gain (or lose), not from the truly wretched. From the French
revolution to the 60s in Europe and the USA, to Korea in the 80s/90s to
Venezuela today.

Yet my kid was still told in school this year that the French revolution was
the peasants rising up. It's not like that theory is believed by any academics
but still it hasn't filtered down to school.

Likewise, as this article describes it, the idea of "the madness of crowds" is
well established in the popular mind, even though it's thoroughly discredited
by academic research.

Yet policy is made based on crazy beliefs. I am still a fan of democracy, but
when the kids are fed a rasher of discredited bullshit in high school it's
hard to see how it can function.

~~~
gohrt
Years ago I heard/read a quotation (that I cannot find a source for now) to
the effect of: "Revolution is the upper and middle classes trading places"

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barrkel
The crowds I've got caught up in made me lose much of my inhibitions and sense
of self. The things I did, I would not have done alone through rational
action. I think the article overplays its hand.

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qnaal
I'll borrow this... straw man? to make a simpler point:

> social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, tried to explain crowd behaviour as a
> paralysis of the brain; hypnotised by the group, the individual becomes the
> slave of unconscious impulses. ‘He is no longer himself, but has become an
> automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will,’ he wrote in 1895.
> ‘Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian…
> a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’

One could just as easily say that individual behavior is paralysis of the
brain, hypnotized by the culture.

If someone is more 'cultivated' as an individual, it's simply because he's had
much more practice in that form- a group of people who act as one is not only
possible, and quite impressive, but it takes work- willpower and practice.

This kind of article, making all kinds of guesses based on little bits of
psychology research, and presenting them as facts...

This is supposed to be an illuminated tech community, so I'll say it straight:
When psychology meets up with the other sciences in the form of ai research,
bs like this will finally be recognized as grossly oversimplistic garbage.

I give the article a C-minus: trying to sound knowledgeable without promoting
much useful information.

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personlurking
"Drury explains that a crisis, even a minor one such as a train breaking down
in a tunnel, creates a ‘psychological crowd’ out of what was previously an
aggregate of strangers. You suddenly share a common fate and your sphere of
interest ramps up from the personal to the group."

___

I wonder how this fits into a scene [1] that happened last week in Sao Paulo
when bus drivers started striking and the metro became overcrowded. It wasn't
due to a crisis, per se, and the metro didn't break down but sensibility
surely went out the window.

My own assessment of the video below is that no one saw themselves as part of
a crowd/group, but as individuals.

1 -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXycKeyDKXk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXycKeyDKXk)
(btw, I shared this as an 'aside' on HN a few days ago)

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solarexplorer
A very nice book on the topic is Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (Masse und
Macht). Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literate and writes very well.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowds_and_Power](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowds_and_Power)

[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masse_und_Macht](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masse_und_Macht)

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synctext
This is a well studied field. For instance, relevant scientific literature:
"How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect"

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108)

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sp332
There's a gender element too. Women have been found to be more aggressive than
men in crowds.
[http://psp.sagepub.com/content/20/1/34.abstract](http://psp.sagepub.com/content/20/1/34.abstract)

~~~
gohrt
Incorrect: Women have been found to be _as_ aggressive than men in crowds:

> men aggressed more than women in the individuated condition, but this
> difference was eliminated in the deindividuated condition.

~~~
sp332
Oh, sorry about that. I was either thinking about a different paper, or I
misremembered this one.

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elinchrome
It reminds me of the G20 protests in Toronto, where there was a crowd of
protesters and a crowd of police. According to this theory, the police did all
of the abuses of power because of their society. Creepy!

