Interesting piece in the Economist on crowds and violence:
ACCORDING to a much-reported survey carried out in 2002, Britain then had 4.3m closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras—one for every 14 people in the country. That figure has since been questioned, but few doubt that Britons are closely scrutinised when they walk the streets. This scrutiny is supposed to deter and detect crime. Even the government’s statistics, though, suggest that the cameras have done little to reduce the worst sort of criminal activity, violence.That may, however, be about to change, and in an unexpected way. It is not that the cameras and their operators will become any more effective. Rather, they have accidentally gathered a huge body of data on how people behave, and particularly on how they behave in situations where violence is in the air.
They mention the work of Mark Levine, a social psychologist who studies crowds and violence:
He (Levine) analysed 42 clips of incidents that operators in a control room had judged had the potential to turn violent, though only 30 of them actually did so. He recorded gestures he labelled either “escalating”, such as pointing and prodding, or “de-escalating”, such as conciliatory open-handedness.His first observation was that bystanders frequently intervene in incipient fights. The number of escalating gestures did not rise significantly as the size of the group increased, contrary to what the bystander effect would predict. Instead, it was the number of de-escalating gestures that grew. A bigger crowd, in other words, was more likely to suppress a fight.
This is reminds me of Deborah Gordon’s work w/ ants and her theories of how ants base their actions on crowd dynamics (starts at around 14 minutes in).
Like in ants, the pattern of interaction with the crowd becomes the basis of decision-making:
Judging the fight to begin with the aggressor’s first pointing gesture towards his target, the researchers found that the first intervention usually involved a bystander trying to calm the protagonist down. Next, another would advise the target not to respond. If a third intervention reinforced crowd solidarity, sending the same peaceful message, then a violent outcome became unlikely. But if it did not—if the third bystander vocally took sides, say—then violence was much more likely.Dr Levine talks of a “collective choreography” of violence, in which the crowd determines the outcome as much as the protagonist and the target do, and he is now taking his ideas into the laboratory. In collaboration with Mel Slater, a computer scientist at University College, London, he is looking at the responses of bystanders to violence recreated in virtual reality.
This is cool research with real ramifications…it could help crowds to more intelligently self regulate and also shed light on the moral geography of the individual versus the crowd.
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This all reminds me of another Economist article on folks who do surveillance work in supermarkets.
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