Contagion in Explaining Riots - Essay Example

THE CONCEPTS OF DEINDIVIDUATION AND CONTAGION IN EXPLAINING RIOTS Location Collective behavior is rather contradictory thing as it can be considered in both aspects: as dangerous destructive force and as a tool for great social changes. But analyzing the phenomena closer we face with deep fundamental stimuli of human mind, which make people participate in massive collective interactions with others and these impulses can create either negative or constructive grass-root movement. Still it is important to analyze the social psychological theories concerning the issue of the nature of mass movements in order to understand what stimulates people to participate in destructive movements with massive rioting and looting like in the situation of the riots that took place in England in 2011. The main noticeable attribute of collective behavior is fast widespread and transmissibility of common actions. The sociologic contagion theory explains why it happens that people take the same behavioral line in a crowd. But the theorists of social psychology still cannot find agreement on this issue, so the concept of the theory is explained in a different ways. The first theorists who formulated the theory were Gustave Le Bon, James Mark Baldwin, and Gabriel Tarde; they argued that the theory is opposite to biological explanation of collective behavior, but more specific researches on the topic appeared in the 1950s. In general the contagion theory claims that crowd has a special hypnotic influence on its members, so the same moods are rapidly spread within a crowd (Levy & Nail 1993). The main point why people tend to fall under collective influence is that they give up their personal and social responsibility to the rest of the participants of a crowd and let their emotions depend on the common moods of the crowd. Some social scientific researches divide social contagion into different broad areas: “hysterical contagions, deliberate self-harm contagions, contagions of aggression, rule violation contagions, consumer behavior contagions, and financial contagions” (Marsden 1998). Considering collective behavior it becomes obvious that the most common kinds of social contagions applied in a crowd are hysterical and rule violation contagions, and the contagions of aggression; according to the theory any kind of crowd is a mass of people who become bounded to each other once they are assembled in one place. Thus the moods that are spread within a crowd can transform this crowd into one united organism that lives by its own, which makes crowd a dangerous tool of manipulation. So often the participants of a crowd start behaving irrationally and aggressively as they wouldn’t behave if they were among their acquaintances or friends (Neal 1993, p. 94). Deindividuation theory describes another aspect of collective behavior adding some nuances to the concept of contagion. Deindividuation emphasizes on anonymity of people in crowd and is defined as a “condition of relative anonymity in which group members do not feel single out of identifiable” (Vander Zanden 1981, p. 290). The point is that anonymity allows people to reveal the emotions and actions that are usually held back in society where each human has individuality. So anonymity becomes a basis for euphoria that makes people feel free doing anything they want together with others. In fact the theory of deindividuation claims that the loss of identity in a crowd weakens people’s inner social restrictions that usually hold them from acting enormously. In closer consideration it becomes obvious that the theories explained above are the two aspects of the same process. Firstly, people become easily affected with the same moods and mass actions when they are in crowd. The reason why this happens is because they start feeling like everything is possible when they operate together, because the personal responsibility,each of them usually has is shared among all the participants of the crowd, so literally there is no responsibility per each individual, because there are no individuals (deindividuation). It turns out that the concept of anonymity is the core for understanding the behavioral principles of mass movement. First of all, anonymity brings people power that let them to set free the feelings that usually hold them from doing what they really want in society. Such feelings as shame, guilt, and fear to be punished keep people from doing something which is not under the law. When people usually can allow themselves to behave extremely unethical in crowd, the participants of the crowd get away with riot and loot which would never happen if each of them was by himself individually. The concept of the loss of individuality evidently fits both deindividuation and contagion theories as anonymity allows people to reveal their worse human qualities, emotions, and impulsive, irrational, aggressive actions which are associated with collective behavior. Zimbardo (1969) divides anonymity into the two types. The first one is concerning the anonymity when a person is being “submerged in a crowd” by hiding in some way, for example, by wearing uniform, mask, or being in darkness. Another anonymity can occur when people around can’t estimate the actions of the person by judging, criticizing, or punishing, that’s why there is no need for this person to be afraid of social evaluation (Zimbardo 1969, p. 255). Thus the concept of anonymity explains why people in crowd feel free from social responsibility and bond to each other to keep this feeling of freedom from social restrictions. Probably, this is the fundamental reason why people in crowd (either spontaneous or organized) are considered as a single organism by social psychologists. Another theory that explains mass behavior is the social identity theory, which claims that any person has a need to be identified with some social group or category, where people are connected by the same social identification or consider themselves as members of the specific group (Stets & Burke 2000, p. 225). That’s why, according to the theory, people participate in mass movements because they are under control of this need to identify themselves with the massive group of people. Indeed, the argument is quite reasonable if considering it within the scopes of mass movements analysis. But still it scarcely explains why people allow themselves to behave immoral as crowd participants. Analyzing the so-called “BlackBerry riots’ that took place in England in 2011 we can see that the theory of social identity doesn’t explain why precisely the youth decided to rebel and start looting and destroying property. The deindividuation and contagion theories work more evidently in this situation. What makes analysis more complicated is the presence of social media and their influence on the riots, as this factor can point out at all the three theories’ roles in creating the mass disturbances. The point is that in social media the young people could find out that the riots were going to start, so they could decide that they want to participate. First of all, because it was a great opportunity to feel themselves a part of a huge movement, also, they understood that there was a possibility not to be caught by police in the crowd of protesters as they would become anonymous in such a huge mass of people. The arguments seem quite reasonable, so why would we make the theories opposite to each other if they all are sensible enough to work together? It is possible to say that the theory of social identity can be a stimulus for people to decide to participate in a mass movement but it doesn’t have enough arguments to explain the essence of rioting and looting within the destructive kinds of movements. And that’s where it is important to use the deindividuation and contagion theories as they show why precisely people become hypnotized by masses and why anonymity helps them to give up their individualities. Mass movements are frequently associated with the actions of destruction where such things as rioting and looting normally take place. As even the constructive social revolutions were made using such destruction-based movements. The three theories analyzed above show that all of them can be applied analyzing the riots that took place in England in 2011 as the social identity theory explains the reason why the young people decided to participate in the massive disorders, and the theories of deindividuation and contagion give reasonable arguments why the movement participants allowed themselves to behave destructively and rebellious. References Levy, D.A., and Nail, P.R. 1993, “Contagion: A theoretical and empirical review and reconceptualization”, Genetic, Social and General Psychology Monographs , vol.119, pp. 235-183. Marsden, P. 1998, “Memetics & Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?”, The Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, vol.2, n.pag. Neal, D.M. 1993, “A Further Examination of Anonymity, Contagion, and Deindividuation in Crowd and Collective Behavior”, Sociological Focus, vol. 26, 93-107. Stets, J.E., and Burke, P.J. 2000. “Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory”, Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 63, pp. 224-237. Vander Zanden, J. 1982. Social Psychology, 3rd edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Zimbardo, P. 1969. “The Human Choice: Deindividuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos.” Pp. 237-307 in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation edited by William Arnold and David Levine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Read More