In trying to understand how and why crowds go wrong, you can have no better guide than Clifford Stott, senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Liverpool. Stott has risked his life researching his subject. Specifically, he has spent most of his career—more than 20 years so far—conducting a firsthand study of violence among soccer fans. On one particularly dicey trip to Marseilles in 1998, Stott and a small crowd of Englishmen ran away from a cloud of tear gas only to find themselves facing a gang of 50 French toughs, some of them wielding bottles and driftwood. “If you are on your own,” a philosophical fellow Brit remarked to Stott at that moment, “you’re going to get fucked.” This, in a sense, is the fundamental wisdom at the heart of Stott’s work—though he does couch it in somewhat more respectable language."BBM" is BlackBerry Messenger, the main device that helped set off the rioting in Enfield, near London, earlier this year.
To Stott, members of a crowd are never really “on their own.” Based on a set of ideas that he and other social psychologists call ESIM (Elaborated Social Identity Model), Stott believes crowds form what are essentially shared identities, which evolve as the situation changes. We might see a crowd doing something that appears to us to be just mindless violence, but to those in the throng, the actions make perfect sense. With this notion, Stott and his colleagues are trying to rebut an influential line of thinking on crowd violence that stretches from Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 treatise, The Crowd, launched the field of crowd psychology, up to Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. To explain group disorder, Zimbardo and other mid-20th-century psychologists blamed a process they called deindividuation, by which a crowd frees its members to carry out their baser impulses. Through anonymity, in Zimbardo’s view, the strictures of society were lifted from crowds, pushing them toward a state of anarchy and thereby toward senseless violence.
By contrast, Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances. Stott’s response to the riots has been unpopular with many of his countrymen. Unlike Zimbardo, who would respond—and indeed has responded over the years—to incidents of group misbehavior by speaking darkly of moral breakdown, Stott brings the focus back to the long history of societal slights, usually by police, that primed so many young people to riot in the first place.
Meeting Stott in person, one can see how he’s been able to blend in with soccer fans over the years. He’s a stocky guy, with a likably craggy face and a nose that looks suspiciously like it’s been broken a few times. When asked why the recent riots happened, his answers always come back to poor policing—particularly in Tottenham, where questions over the death of a young man went unaddressed by police for days and where the subsequent protest was met with arbitrary violence. Stott singles out one moment when police seemed to handle a young woman roughly and an image of that mistreatment was tweeted (and BBMed) throughout London’s black community and beyond. It was around then that the identity of the crowd shifted, decisively, to outright combat against the police.
Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does.
It’s easy to see how technology can significantly change this starting position. When that tweet or text or BBM blast goes out declaring, as the Enfield message did, that “police can’t stop it,” the eventual crowd will be preselected for a very low L indeed. As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create.
A magnitude 5.1 earthquake has struck Mindanao, Philippines at a depth of 43.2 km (26.8 miles), the quake hit at 20:34:40 UTC Monday 26th December 2011.
A magnitude 4.5 earthquake has struck Southern Iran at a depth of 35.8 km (22.2 miles), the quake hit at 20:18:09 UTC Monday 26th December 2011.
A magnitude 4.8 earthquake has struck Southeast of the Loyalty Islands at a depth of 15.4 km (9.6 miles), the quake hit at 18:31:25 UTC Monday 26th December 2011.
Hundreds of residents in two restive northern Nigerian cities have fled their homes, fearing more violence after a series of bombs swept the country, killing 40 people. Damaturu, which was struck by two blasts on Sunday, killing three, has been at the centre of clashes between Islamists and authorities in recent days, and saw groups gathered at bus and taxi stations looking to leave.
Meanwhile in Potiskum, residents fled after arsonists set alight 30 Christian-owned shops as well as the home of a Christian leader, on Sunday night in what appeared to be the continuation of religious violence that peaked with the bombing of churches on Christmas Day.
"I can't stay here any longer," a man waiting at a bus stop in Potiskum told the Reuters news agency. "It's peaceful today, but it's no guarantee that in the next hours it will remain the same," the 31-year-old said. "People have been killed and it could be me next."
Police in Madalla, Jos and Damaturu – the three cities targeted in Sunday's bombings – ramped up their investigations on Monday.
Marilyn Ogar, a spokesman for the State Security Services would not confirm the number of arrests made in connection with the incidents, citing the sensitivity of the ongoing investigations. But she told the Daily Telegraph that police are "arresting as many people as possible" for questioning. Read More
A magnitude 4.7 earthquake has struck the Ireland Region, Papua New Guinea at a depth of 94.5 km (58.7 miles), the quake hit at 17:55:51 UTC Monday 26th December 2011.
A research ship has arrived to help rescue a Russian fishing vessel that struck ice and became stuck in the frozen waters off of Antarctica 10 days ago, officials in New Zealand said. The Sparta hit underwater ice December 16, leaving a one-foot hole in the ship's hull, according to the New Zealand Rescue Coordination Center.
The ship has been stranded in an area about 2,000 miles from New Zealand, where the ice has been so thick that rescue ships have had difficulty getting close.
Since becoming stuck, 32 crew members have been working with rescuers to try to patch up the hole to keep the ship from sinking. They had been given tools dropped by a New Zealand Air Force plane, helping them pump out freezing water that was rushing into the ship.
But it has been difficult for the crew to both patch up the hole and pump out water, an official said.
"They are having difficulty in trying to fix a patch to the damaged part of the hull because they need to stop one of the pumps to do this, and then the water level creeps up again," Search and Rescue Mission Coordinator Neville Blakemore told the New Zealand Herald. Read More
This time last year a match was lit by a fruit vendor in Tunis, which triggered uprisings throughout the region. Countries big, Egypt, and small, Tunisia, have witnessed wholesale change and the toppling of governments. But at the one year mark, those on the ground here in the region are asking a simple question: Are we better off today than we were before the Arab Spring? People talk of a “The New Middle East” with a mixture of both optimism and despair, from Bahrain to Yemen.
Clearly the voice of the people has been heard and resonates on the streets of Cairo, for example, but unemployment is at a decade long high in Egypt, tourism is down officially by a quarter from a year ago and the Cairo Stock Exchange is the world’s worst performer of 2011.
“This country is literally and figuratively burning and we are approaching the threshold which it will become very hard to rebuild trust in the system,” says Mohamad Al-Ississ, a professor of economics at the American University of Cairo.
Al-Ississ is not optimistic the region’s most populous country can escape “financial Armageddon,” with the erosion of trust in the military. The window of time between now and presidential elections scheduled for late June is considered critical. Read More
A magnitude 4.8 earthquake has struck the Kermadec Islands Region at a depth of 14.3 km (8.9 miles), the quake hit at 16:40:19 UTC Monday 26th December 2011.
A magnitude 4.8 earthquake has struck Carlsberg Ridge at a depth of 10 km (6.2 miles), the quake hit at 16:24:03 UTC Monday 26th December 2011.
A woman who was facing federal charges of sending a fake Weapons of Mass Destruction to a New York politician was killed by police officer after attacking him at her apartment in Marietta, Georgia. In April, Jameela Barnette, 53, mailed a vial of perfume, a hateful letter and a stuffed monkey with a star of David on it to New York state Sen Greg Ball, because she believed he was biased against her Islamic faith.
She also sent a bloody pig's foot and an anti-Semitic letter to Rep Peter King because he was hosting Congressional hearings about 'radicalization' in the American Muslim community.
On Saturday, police were called to Barnette's apartment by a panic alarm. When an officer arrived, police say, Barnette attacked him with a knife and a handgun.
The officer defended himself and shot Barnette, killing her. Read More
A move by the government that clears the way for the legalisation of online poker and other gambling has been condemned as 'outrageous'.A Justice Department opinion dated September - but only made public on Friday - reinterprets a decades-old policy which saw civil and criminal charges against operators of some of the most popular online poker sites.
It is a switch that could spur web-based gambling - and which critics fear will only deepen families' spiraling debts.
A man - believed to be in his late teens or early twenties - has been stabbed to death in Oxford Street, central London, police have said. Most of Oxford Street has been closed in the wake of the attack, which took place at around 13.45 at the junction with Stratford Place, opposite Bond Street underground station.
The victim was pronounced dead at the scene.
The Metropolitan Police said a number of arrests had been made, but that enquiries were continuing.
Sky correspondent Ashish Joshi, who is on Oxford Street, said there were "dozens and dozens" of police officers stopping any pedestrians going near the crime scene.
"We think the stabbing happened outside the Foot Locker shop, but that cannot be confirmed," he said.
"At the moment it is pandemonium on the streets leading up to the West End and it is effectively gridlocked. Read More
A magnitude 5.6 earthquake has struck Vanuatu at a depth of 69.9 km (43.4 miles), the quake hit at 16:12:36 UTC Monday 26th December 2011.
A magnitude 4.8 earthquake has struck the Fiji Region at a depth of 584.3 km (363.1 miles), the quake hit at 13:05:30 UTC Monday 26th December 2011.