The Contagion Destructive Collective Behavior - Essay Example

The Contagion Destructive Collective Behavior 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. The main reason why people decide to participate in mass movements is that being in a crowd lets them abandon responsibility for their individuality and behave the way they wouldn’t behave being in normal circumstances. The main noticeable attribute of collective behavior is fast widespread and transmissibility of common actions. The social psychological contagion theory explains why people often start acting the same way, taking similar behavioral line in a crowd. 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. This means that it is more about psychological deep impulses and behavioral patterns which make people join mass movements. 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 2003). 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. Even though the theorists of social psychology still cannot find agreement on this issue and the concept of the theory is explained in a different ways, still multiple explanations of the phenomenon of massive contagion agree that it is about some essential feeling that people start sharing once they are happened to be in a crowd. In fact, the hypnotic influence of crowd is some kind of feeling that when the participants of a mass movement stick together everything is possible for them. The point is that this feeling is the pure realization of freedom and power people get being together with others. Having this feeling, people start to allow themselves rather destructive behavioral patterns. A famous Stanford Prison Experiment revealed the specific feature of human nature concerning the fact that when people get the feeling of unlimited power and ability to act in a bad way, they mostly start behaving destructively (McDermott 2007). Obviously, when a person finds oneself in a crowd and has the feeling that everything is possible, the first thing that comes into the one’s mind is to destroy as much as possible to destroy around. Being together and feeling this unspoken resolution to destroy, people want to preserve this freedom for as long as possible, so they go mad and even often lose their morality (Marx 1990). Thus, considering collective behavior, it becomes obvious why the most common kinds of social contagions applied in a crowd are hysterics, rule violation contagions, and the contagions of aggression; according to the contagion theory, any kind of crowd is a mass of people who become bounded to each other once they are assembled in one place. That’s the reason why the moods that are spread within a crowd can transform these people of the crowd into one united organism that lives by its own. The tendency actually makes crowd a dangerous tool of manipulation, because often the participants of a crowd start behaving irrationally and aggressively, which way they wouldn’t behave if they were among their acquaintances or friends (Neal 1993). Still collective behavior cannot be explained only by some abstract feelings and moods that disseminate within a mass of people by some metaphysical way. Deindividuation theory describes another aspect of collective behavior, adding some essential 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. The point is that when during the lifetime we form our individuality creating a special behavioral line that would describe us as these or that kinds of persons. Usually the way we want others to see us is decent human beings. When we have an opportunity to abandon the social mask we wear, we usually want to let ourselves to do everything we weren’t able to do being socially adapt ourselves. 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 of contagion and deindividuation 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). For obvious reasons mass movements are often attractive for many people and frequently most of them think that they attend the collective meetings for the ideas they can stand for through participation in mass movements (Marsden 2000). But it turns out that actually people like grass-root movements because of the feelings they can get by being together with other people. The concept of anonymity is the core for understanding the behavioral principles of mass movement. First of all, anonymity brings people power that lets 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. As a concept anonymity is rather abstract because in different situations it can look differently. As for social psychological kind of anonymity Zimbardo (1969) divides it 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. Mass movements are frequently associated with the actions of destruction where such things as rioting and looting normally take place and even the constructive social revolutions were made using such destruction-based movements. The main reason why people tend to participate in such events is that the grass-root movements allow them to abandon their personal responsibility and share some permissiveness with many other anonyms who feel the same way. References 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. Levy, D.A., and Nail, P.R. (2003) “Contagion: A theoretical and empirical review and reconceptualization”. Genetic, Social and General Psychology Monographs, 119, 235-183. McDermott, R. (2007). “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo”. Political Psychology, 28, 644-646. Marx, G.T. (1990). “Issueless Riots”. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 391, 21-33. Neal, D.M. (1993) “A Further Examination of Anonymity, Contagion, and Deindividuation in Crowd and Collective Behavior”, Sociological Focus, 26, 93-107. Vander Zanden, J. (1982) Social Psychology, 3rd edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Marsden, P. (2000) “Memetics & Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?”, The Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 2, n.pag. Read More