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Stephen Reicher, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK
John Drury, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract
In this article, we rst review classic models of crowd and collective psychology, second outline a contemporary approach to
crowd phenomena based on social identity theorizing, and third apply this approach to understand the dynamics of social
conict and social change. We nish by arguing that crowd and collective psychology needs to be moved from the periphery
to the center of social psychology and the social sciences and that its continuing exclusion reects a tendency to underrepresent and undervalue resistance to and change of the existing social order.
Introduction
The term collective behavior has many different meanings in
different disciplines. It has variously been used to refer to the
behavior of the masses in society, to publics or groups organized around a particular issue, to social movements which are
organized to effect change around an issue, and to crowds
which are physically copresent groups characteristically (but
not necessarily) organized around some event (such as
a sporting crowd) or some shared concern (such as a protest
crowd).
Psychologists, however, have generally concentrated on the
last of these meanings. Collective behavior and crowds become
largely synonymous. This is the position we shall follow here.
Additionally we shall use the term collective action to refer to
instances where crowd members act together in a coordinated
way.
The psychological study of crowds and collective action
attests to a profound conservatism at the core of the discipline.
Crowds have tended to be feared and reviled as a threat to the
status quo in society. They are an eruption of the primitive, the
passionate, and the pathological which has the potential to
shatter the order and reason of everyday life.
This leads to two problems: one of commission and one of
omission. On the one hand, where crowds and collective action
are studied, they are viewed as something exotic and exceptional which reveals the breakdown of ordinary psychological
processes and hence has little to tell us about these processes.
On the other hand, when it does come to the bread and butter
issues that dominate the discipline, crowds and collective
action are all but ignored. In psychology we are predominantly
concerned with what individuals see, think, and feel and our
interventions are designed to change perceptions, cognitions,
and emotions. Collective action, it appears, has no place in this
at all.
Here, we will examine the traditional psychology of crowds
and collective action, how it came into being, and what it has to
say about these phenomena. We will then outline a body of
recent work which challenges the pathologizing perspective of
this traditional work and which shows collective action to be
meaningful, purposeful, and both reecting and also changing
the perspectives of participants. Moreover, we will point to the
ways in which collective action plays a pivotal role in shaping
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 4
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in general and the police in particular, others who see themselves as in an antagonistic relationship to the police and
authorities. To the extent that the police themselves see the
entire crowd as antagonistic and to the extent that they use their
power to act on this perception (for instance, using coercive
tactics to contain or disperse the crowd as a whole), then
a series of consequences are set in motion.
First, those in the crowd who previously saw themselves as
aligned with the authorities are repositioned as antagonistic
and hence begin to redene themselves, their relationship with
the authorities and with fellow crowd members. They begin to
see the police as an oppressive out-group acting in illegitimate
and oppressive ways. Next, whereas the crowd as a whole was
previously segmented into separate groups, their common
positioning by the police leads to the emergence of a sense of
shared identity and hence the sense of solidarity and empowerment described above. This sense of empowerment enables
crowd members to challenge what they see as oppressive crowd
action. Finally, the actions of the crowd conrm and consolidate the original police perceptions of the crowd as a homogeneous danger. In this way, a spiral of escalating radicalization
in the crowd and of escalating conict between crowd members
and the police is set in motion (for analyses of such dynamics,
see Stott and Drury, 2000; Stott et al., 2001).
As can be seen, this dynamic sets in train a whole series of
changes. Most obviously, it changes participants sense of their
social position and hence their social identity. As a consequence, it changes the way in which people see their relationship with others not just the police and authorities. Most
immediately, members of the crowd who might previously
have been seen as other come to be seen as fellow crowd
members. Thus Drury charts how an antiroad building
campaign was initially split between locals and seasoned
environmentalist campaigners. Locals viewed the environmentalists with suspicion, as unrespectable and as outsiders.
However common experiences of harsh policing led to the
formation of a single category and to intimate in-group relations between erstwhile opponents (Drury and Reicher, 2009).
Such recategorization was not limited to the actual participants
in the local campaign. More generally, locals came to see
others involved in antiroad campaigns around the country and
in conict with the authorities as in a similar social position to
themselves and hence as part of a broad oppositional category. As a result, support and solidarity for their struggles
developed. The emergence of more global categories both
within the specic campaign and more generally went hand
in hand with a greater sense of empowerment and hence
a greater condence in taking action (Drury and Reicher, 2009).
Willingness to take action was not just a matter of
empowerment. It is also derived from a reconceptualization of
what the campaign was all about and hence a change in
understanding as to what constituted success. Whereas, to
begin with, the locals saw the campaign as a matter of
convincing reasonable authorities to protect their community,
as they began to see the authorities as unreasonable and
antagonistic, so they saw the mere act of resistance and exposing
the nature of the State as a crucial achievement in the longerterm campaign. Hence, even if the road was built through the
community, the campaign could still be seen as part of a longerterm success in terms of changing government roads policy.
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generally lead to greater liking between dominant and subordinate group members (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006). Such
ndings have led researchers to conclude that contact is the
royal road to change our unequal society. But there is
a problem with this work. It does not lie so much in the welldocumented link between contact and liking, but in the
assumption of a link between liking and social change. Indeed
there are a variety of reasons for thinking that liking may not
improve relations of social inequality (Dixon et al., 2012).
There is ample evidence that dominant group members can
like their subordinates without believing that they should be
equals or indeed supporting moves toward equality (Dixon
et al., 2012). This is most obvious in the case of gender relations: men can like women while treating them as inferiors
something that is encapsulated in the notion of benevolent
sexism (Glick and Fiske, 2001). However, even in more
extreme cases, like that of slavery, there is evidence that many
owners looked kindly on their slaves and felt that ownership
protected inferior creatures from the depredations of the freemarket. Thus, they could depict slavery as a blessing to both
master and slave (Fox-Genovese and Genovese, 2005: p. 515).
However such fondness lasted only as long as slaves accepted
their place. Should they challenge it, benevolence would
rapidly change to anger and brutality. But despite that, there
were multiple challenges and indeed slave revolts were critical
to the eventual abolition of slavery itself.
The same is true for most entrenched forms of inequality.
The end of apartheid, the introduction of civil rights to AfricanAmericans, and the granting of votes to women, all were
a result of collective action. To cite Barack Obamas speech in
Selma on 4 March 2007 Im here because someone marched.
It is hard to think of circumstances where equality has been
freely granted through the individual kindness of the dominant
group members. On the whole it has been claimed through the
collective mobilization of subordinate group members. That is
why it is particularly worrying that contact may have a demobilizing effect on them. Thus there is growing evidence that
increasing contact and increasing the extent to which subordinate group members like dominant group members may
actually decrease the extent to which the former will demand
and agitate for change in part at least because it reduces their
perception of racial discrimination and increases their perceptions of social mobility (Wright and Lubensky, 2009).
So, even where social psychology does address issues of
social change, collective action tends to be neglected. This is not
just a conceptual issue. The focus on psychological rather than
sociostructural outcomes leads to the employment of strategies
that demobilize people and therefore leave structural inequalities in society intact.
Conclusion
In this article we have considered both how crowds and
collective action have been studied in social psychology and
also how they have been neglected. We have encountered
evidence to show both that the study of collective action allows
us to understand the nature of social action and social change,
and also that collective action is critical to achieving social
change. Our conclusion is that a social psychology which
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marginalizes collective action will be both intellectually decient and socially conservative. For both reasons, we reiterate
that the study of collective action needs to be moved from the
periphery to the core of the discipline.
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