Rethinking the Psychology of Crowds

For more than a century, the behaviour of people in crowds has fascinated and worried those who study society. The tone was set in 1895 by the French writer Gustave Le Bon, whose short book on the crowd became enormously influential. In a crowd, Le Bon argued, the thinking individual disappears. People are gripped by a kind of collective mind, lose their sense of individuality and self-control, and sink to a more primitive and emotional level, so that a gathering of reasonable citizens can behave, in his view, like a single irrational beast. Le Bon wrote at a time of revolutions, strikes and mass movements, and his dark portrait of the crowd reflected the anxieties of the comfortable classes of his day, who feared the gatherings of ordinary people in the streets and were glad of a theory that painted them as dangerous and unthinking.

Central to this gloomy picture was the idea of contagion. Le Bon believed that emotions and impulses spread through a crowd almost like a disease, leaping from person to person until the whole mass was swept along by feelings that no individual would have acted on alone. This notion of the mindless, dangerous mob proved remarkably durable, and for much of the twentieth century talk of 'mass panic' and 'mob mentality' shaped the way governments, journalists and police forces thought about large gatherings of people. The idea was convenient as well as vivid, for if crowds were simply mindless mobs, then those in authority bore little responsibility for understanding them, and force could be excused as the only language such a mob was thought to understand.

Modern research tells a very different story. Psychologists such as Stephen Reicher and John Drury have argued that crowds are far from mindless. Rather than losing their identity, people in a crowd often take on a shared social identity, a strong sense of belonging to the group, and it is this common identity that gives collective behaviour its order and its meaning. Crowds do not act at random; they act in ways that make sense given who their members feel themselves to be at that moment. A crowd of football supporters, a crowd of worshippers and a crowd of protesters behave in strikingly different ways, not because the psychology of crowds changes but because the identity that binds each one is different, and that shared sense of who 'we' are shapes what the group considers right and reasonable to do.

Nowhere is this clearer than in emergencies. The popular image is of a terrified mob trampling one another in blind panic, yet careful studies of real disasters repeatedly find something else: people remaining surprisingly calm, forming orderly lines, and going out of their way to help complete strangers to escape. A shared sense of common fate, it seems, tends to produce cooperation rather than every-person-for-themselves chaos, and genuine mass panic turns out to be far rarer than newspaper headlines would suggest. Survivors of fires, sinkings and stadium emergencies describe again and again how strangers helped one another, held doors, guided the injured and waited their turn even in mortal danger, a picture almost the opposite of the stampeding mob of popular imagination.

This matters, because the old view could itself be dangerous. When crowd disasters do occur, the cause is usually not madness but a physical crush, in which too many bodies are forced into too small a space, often as a result of poor design or mismanagement, until people are injured simply by the pressure of those around them. Blaming such tragedies on the supposed hysteria of the victims conveniently hides their real, and preventable, causes. Treating crowds instead as reasoning groups of people, with shared purposes and a keen sense of fairness, has become the foundation of modern thinking about how to keep large gatherings safe. Crowd managers now plan for the way real people actually behave, designing entrances, exits and barriers to prevent dangerous build-ups of pressure, and communicating clearly with those present rather than treating them as an enemy to be contained. The shift in thinking has almost certainly saved lives. It has also changed the way such events are described after the fact, replacing lazy talk of hysteria and stampede with harder questions about how a space was designed, how a crowd was managed and who, if anyone, had failed in their duty of care. In this way a better understanding of ordinary human behaviour has quietly become a matter of public safety.