Reicher (2016). "La beauté est dans la rue". Four reasons (or perhaps five) to study crowds. - Article summary

In crowds, loss of identity (1), loss of rationality (2) and a loss of morality (3) are thought to occur. Mass society theory states that physical and social divisions between classes makes social order difficult to maintain as people might become vulnerable to manipulation and especially powerful in one single group when freed from a rigid hierarchical order.

This theory however, attempts to maintain the status quo and sees the crowd member as barbarians who are mindless. This takes away responsibility from the elite in violence of crowds. This theory legitimises repression.

In politics, crowd are generally seen as unable to properly reason and the collective should be guided and feared. The idea is that individual judgement is always better than collective judgement. This idea might stem from the inherent idea that individual’s reasoning is flawed but extrapolated to the collective.

In studying crowds, there is a large focus on methodologies which do not reflect the empirical reality and explanations for failed hypotheses will be sought for in methodological flaws rather than empirical flaws. It mostly relies on internal referentiality, the question of how an experiment relates to previous experiments. External referentiality, the question of how an experiment relates to the external world would be more important. The focus of studying crowds is too much on testing hypothesis rather than generating and validating hypotheses.

Crowd actions are mostly interpreted in the terms and norms of the external observer and when this does not make sense it is put aside as irrational. However, an internal actor might make sense of it and this account can be useful for generating and validating hypotheses.

The social identity model of crowds states that crowd members shift from personal identity to social identity and do not lose their identity in the crowd. The elaborated social identity model of crowds (ESIM) states that conflict escalates because the outgroup (e.g. police) treats everyone in the ingroup as the same, leading to the notion in the ingroup that the outgroup is a threat and people in the ingroup will feel more connected to one another.

This theory has three general implications for social psychological theorising:

1. The theory suggests a more dynamic paradigm for understanding group processes.
2. The theory suggests that the transformation that are wrought when intergroup dynamics create new forms of common fate and new social identities are more extensive than previously thought.
3. The theory challenges the dominant perceptualism of social psychology for which understanding and action derive from the ways we look at and process information in the social world.

The ESIM theory states that people do not make sense of their experience alone but are confronted with multiple influence sources who interpret this experience in different ways. People are mostly influenced by sources who share identity, values and perspective.

Crowds play an important role in producing the social relations which constitute society. Some groups are so big (e.g. a country) that it could never be one crowd so the crowd is the imagined community made manifest. It is an embodied manifestation of the abstract category.

The impact of the crowd events on the watching public depends on the way crowd members are categorized. This makes categorical definitions central to what crowds are able to achieve. Crowds can reframe the understandings and the organization of society but it depends on categorical representation.

It is not clear how a crowd can influence non-crowd members.