| Be like everyone else, otherwise they will crush you The crowd as a psychological phenomenon began to be studied back in the 19th century. Even then, the Frenchman Le Bon formulated the main thing that can be said about it: “The conscious personality disappears... A collective soul is formed... The intellectual abilities of individuals disappear, and unconscious qualities take over. In a crowd, only stupidity can accumulate, not intelligence.”
The crowd phenomenon is as old as humanity itself. Dionysian holidays, crusades, European flagellants and Russian “Khlysty”, carnivals, hysteria, monastic hysterics... Finally, the twentieth century brought fascism, show business, football passions and totalitarian sects. All these are so-called mass phenomena, united by the fact that their participants literally stop thinking. We ourselves recently saw how “unconscious qualities take over” and how the eerie “collective soul” behaves when it breaks free. On Manezhnaya Square, after a lost football match.
Professor Anatoly ZHURAVLEV, acting director of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, talks about the crowd phenomenon.
- Anatoly Laktionovich, how many people is this crowd?
-- A crowd cannot be determined by quantity, it is determined by specific characteristics. The first is that people must be in such close proximity, in such close physical contact, that they can enter each other's personal spaces. Everyone has a certain space into which they do not allow another person, even a close one. So, in crowds, people enter each other’s personal spaces, creating psychological discomfort.
We can ride on the subway or on a crowded bus, huddled together, but we don’t realize it - we’re used to it. But when strangers enter personal space, mental tension always arises. And crowds are characterized by increased mental stress due to the discomfort created by large crowds of people. This is one of the signs of a crowd - a high degree of contact and high tension due to the violation of personal spaces.
- Okay, but still, with what number of people is the crowd phenomenon most likely to manifest itself?
-- We can speak only conditionally about quantitative characteristics. The so-called small group is up to 25-30 people. A medium-sized group - up to 100-150 people. After this, the phenomena of a large social group begin. Crowd effects usually occur in crowds of more than 120-150 people. Among the specific effects of the crowd, along with high contact, which generates mental stress, is increased emotional arousal. In crowds, people do not remain calm; they are unbalanced.
- Because they are cramped, they are compressed?
- Not only that. Crowds, as a rule, gather for some reason, and the reason is always emotionally charged - a threat, something unusual, interesting, significant. Therefore, people in a crowd are in a state of heightened emotional arousal. A very important phenomenon is that individual members of the crowd express this excitement more intensely and infect others. One of the very serious mechanisms, without which there is no crowd, is the mechanism of mental contagion, when the mental state and forms of behavior of one person are transmitted to another. One begins to speak in a raised tone - and others, one shouts - and others, one waves his hands - and others. And at some moments they begin to behave the same way. Pay attention to teenagers at concerts. At first they all behave differently - they move, dance, each in their own way. And after 30-40 minutes they are already jumping, screaming and waving their arms in the same way.
- Why does this infection occur?
- You see, psychologists haven’t fully explained this. It is clear that this is not an imitation, the mechanism is different. By imitating, we look at the model and begin to consciously repeat and adapt. Mental infection has a different nature. It is transmitted automatically, involuntarily. That is, it seems to me that I am behaving this way, that it is coming from me, but in fact it is not coming from me, but from others. These are imposed forms of behavior.
- But the crowd is not always in one state; it, like a living being, develops in time and space. It's emerging... and what's next?
- Of course, the crowd has certain stages of development, at each of which its characteristics change. The pattern is that it will definitely move from a passive state to an active state, which is characterized by the group’s readiness for joint action. The crowd cannot always be passive. Emotional excitement and mental tension are growing, people want to do something, all that remains is to tell them, show them what to do, all that remains is to push them.
- So that’s why they say that the crowd is subject to different influences.
- Very susceptible. An active, excited, action-ready crowd easily becomes aggressive.
- Why is aggression necessary? Why doesn’t the crowd go, for example, to plant flowers?
- Here's why. The prolonged experience of tension, which is called accumulation, cannot be sustained. There must be a release, a release of tension. And the forms of withdrawal can be different.
- So it’s not necessarily aggression?
- Not necessarily. The easiest way to relieve tension is to get out of the crowd.
- But how can one get out if a person has already been “involved”, “infected”, imbued with the goals of the crowd? He won't want to leave.
- You can leave the crowd when it is in a passive stage or at some initial stages of an active state. But at a certain stage, you really can’t pull a person out of the crowd. He won’t go, he wants to be in the crowd and finish the job, accomplish something. Action is a release of tension. People have accumulated tension - they must definitely relieve it. But here, I emphasize, a very serious factor is the distance between people. Distance people from each other (this is also called “dispersing the crowd”) - and mental stress will begin to subside on its own.
- Still, I don’t really believe that in the crowd I’ll be like everyone else...
- There are live recordings of people in the crowd. So, when they watch it, they don’t understand why they behaved this way. But every psychologist understands this: they behaved according to the laws of the crowd. And this has a protective, adaptive function.
- Otherwise they will crush it?
-- Certainly! Behaving differently from everyone else is physically dangerous. If you are lazy and just watch the crowd when they are smashing something, then they can kill you too. If you don't hit, you might get hurt yourself.
There is one more thing I would like to say. One of the effects of a crowd is the so-called mobilization, an increase in both physical and mental activity of a person. The man in the crowd becomes stronger.
- Maybe this is the reason that some people are happy to gather in crowds - it’s nice to feel strong.
“I need to tell you that those things that a person can do in a crowd - like when two people turn over a heavy car - he will never repeat outside the crowd. Never during an investigative experiment will he tear out a tree or break a twig. This is the crowd effect - mobilization. And then, in a crowd a person feels “included”, he is protected, he is among everyone.
- Tell me, does he have a feeling of “we”, “ours”, “ours”, although he sees his neighbors for the first time in his life?
-- Undoubtedly. Psychologists call this the “we” feeling. We are a group, we are a force, although they do not know each other. This is a purely psychological effect. The intensity of these effects can be different, but, you know, it is heated up and intensified due to the significance of the event that gathered the crowd.
- Oh, so the army probably rests on these effects? Perhaps the military heroism of the infantry is also fueled by them?
-- Certainly! Well, the degree of excitement is determined by the significance of the event around which the crowd has gathered. And the higher the significance of the event - and it can be increased artificially - the more acutely the failure is experienced. An example is the match with Japan. The significance of this event was artificially increased. The background was this: this championship is important for the country, our guys must perform with dignity, and they can perform with dignity. You see, the media created the illusion that we have a strong team, that the guys can win at the world level, although throughout the last year not a single meeting ended well. Professional people, football experts, gave quite adequate assessments, but politics intervened. She interferes with sports everywhere. With the help of sports, in particular football, many political problems are solved - both those related to gaining the popularity of politicians, and many others. And when politics intervenes, it always creates a special urgency for the event. Of course, through our participation in the championship they wanted to increase, as social psychologists say, the level of our positive social identity.
- I mean, but we know how to play football?
- In the last 10-15 years, we have suffered failures at the level of the entire country, and against this background it was necessary to give something to people so that they could positively identify themselves with their country, with their society. This is normal and correct, but it requires reasons. It was necessary to predict: and if we are talking about an unprofessional, unprepared team, then what will this lead to? Instead of positive identification, we may end up with resentment. This leads to the acuteness of experiencing those failures that could have ended with what? The ones who will say “when did we perform successfully”? Never. What is there to be outraged about? Nothing.
— At the beginning of our conversation, you said that the crowd quickly nominates the most active ones. Who are these active comrades?
- Let's put it this way: these are those who most strongly influence others, they are the source of infection. Unfortunately, it takes very few of them to get the crowd excited. English psychologists give the following figures: for youth groups it is 1-1.5 percent.
- Different peoples have different ideas about personal space - some have more, some have less. Does this circumstance influence the behavior of crowds in different countries? Are the laws by which crowds live around the world the same or different?
- You know, there is a lot in common in the behavior of crowds, including the behavior of fans. But still, the so-called characteristics of ethnoculture can, of course, manifest themselves in a specific way. For example, it is known that the most cruel fans are English.
- It would seem...
- Yes! But for a psychologist this is a normal thing, and here’s why. A conservative society with deep traditions, where there are a lot of conventions, a so-called prim society, where four spoons, four forks can be placed in front of you, and only in a certain sequence you must use them. There are many conventions, a person is compressed. There are a lot of social regulators. And the accumulation of tension is inevitable. It accumulates and the fans erupt into such unrest, such cruelty... English fans are feared all over the world.
- Last, practical question. What should a person do when a crowd is coming towards him? They say you can't run away from a dog - it will only make it angry. And from the crowd?
-- Care. You need to leave the crowd space and distance yourself. You don't have to run. But negotiating is useless. Only professionally trained people can do this, when one professional can put down 70 people going berserk. There are such people. Maria Bochkareva, a female soldier, left an excellent description of the crowd in her book “Yashka”. Growing up in a poor peasant family, she disguised herself as a man, went to the front and spent the entire First World War and the Civil War in the trenches (in 1920 she was shot by security officers).
It happened in 1917, on the Russian-German front. The soldiers' rally turned into something monstrous. “Finally, a wave of raging soldiers reached the headquarters. Screams and screams were heard. For a moment we all froze in alarm. But then Colonel Belonogov said that he would go out to the soldiers and try to reason with them. The colonel had a quiet voice and a kind heart. He never allowed familiarity even in his treatment of his orderly. When he once submitted a report to be transferred to another unit, the soldiers begged their superiors not to let him go.” Bochkareva further writes that Belonogov calmly went out onto the porch and began to exhort the soldiers. “Guys, what are you doing? Come to your senses and remember your duty,” he said. It ended badly. “Suddenly, someone knocked the stool out from under the colonel’s feet. The next second, a hundred soldiers rushed down and mercilessly trampled this noble man under their heavy boots. Several thousand people turned into animals. Swaying as if drunk, they knocked the last signs of life out of their victim.”
Then Bochkareva herself came out onto the porch. Her speech was very emotional, in contrast to the calm speech of the deceased. She tore her tunic and shouted: “Scoundrels! You can kill me! Who saved your skins under fire? Why did you kill him? The initiative was intercepted. “The air was filled with sorrowful cries. Many in the crowd began to cry." There was talk that the colonel should be buried with full military honors. There were volunteers in the crowd who were ready to take on the task of making the coffin and wreaths, digging the grave, etc. “Several thousand soldiers, so humble and obedient, with their cheeks still wet with tears, seemed like a flock of lost sheep. Overwhelmed by grief, the soldiers stood silent, occasionally exchanging words of regret about what had happened.” At the officer's funeral, everyone cried and prayed. “All this seemed incredible, but nevertheless it was so,” Bochkareva concludes.
Hakob Nazaretyan: “Stupidity, not villainy, is most often to blame for social misfortunes”
Professor Hakob Nazaretyan, author of the book “Psychology of Spontaneous Mass Behavior,” traveled around the world and saw how crowds behave on the hottest continents. There is no particular difference between nations, he says.
- Akop Pogosovich, I can’t believe that in a crowd all people behave the same. What about intelligence and culture? Is it really possible that academicians, succumbing to mental infection, will act out like football fans?
- There is such a concept - the geography of the crowd. If you look at the aggressive crowd from above, you can see that it is heterogeneous. It has a denser core, where mutual infection is much more powerful, and there is a periphery. Thus, the crowd of pogromists is divided into a relatively small number of those who kill and rape, those who support them with shouts and hooting, and those who support them, but not so actively, and, finally, those who just watch. As for academics... Experience shows that in a crowd, psychic infection affects everyone. True, people who are more intellectually developed and more adapted to urban culture have less tendency to form random crowds. In addition, if a person knows the patterns of crowd behavior, he can refrain from doing something.
- So what, the mechanism of mental infection will not affect him?
- It will work. But a person will be able to resist him, even counteract the crowd... And if a professional infiltrates the crowd with a manipulative task - to redirect the attention of the crowd, change its state - then he is able to direct both his psychological arousal and the excitement of the crowd in the right direction.. .. But this is with appropriate preparation. And just like that, even an academician will find it very difficult to resist the emotional environment. Unless he's a psychologist.
You know, now they are starting to say that they should send more police with machine guns to Manezhnaya. This is ridiculous talk. They forget that it was our children who were there at Manezhnaya. Well, not mine, not yours, but the neighbors... And the riot police are not the point. We need to prepare for such mass events. This is why psychology is needed, so that there is no physical violence. After all, there are techniques for working with a crowd! In the 70s and 80s, Moscow psychologists taught these techniques to left-wing politicians from Portugal to Chile. And now it suddenly turns out that no one in Moscow can tell you what to do. This is called “there is no prophet in his own country.”
— Akop Pogosovich, does the tendency to act aggressively in a crowd differ among different nations?
- This tendency will be influenced by the level of critical thinking, but nevertheless in a variety of countries... I don’t know many Scots, but usually they have colorless eyes and unemotional speech. I look at them and think, how is it that during football matches they bite police dogs and do what the hell? Not the Italians, not the Spaniards, but the British turn out to be the most hooligans. And it turns out that the level of culture...
- Doesn't it bother you?
- It doesn’t interfere... You see, a crowd is an evolutionary regression, when the lowest layers of your psyche come to life. The deeper we go into history, the smaller the differences between cultures. And the less differences are needed to arouse mutual hatred. Therefore, even now, in a state of passion, the differences between crowds of Russians, Africans, French or Chinese tend to zero. If the brutal Jacobins in “humane” France caught pregnant aristocrats, cut out the fetus from the womb, skewered it on bayonets and walked around Paris... Even the Bolsheviks, it seems, did not think of such a thing.
By the way, many situations related to crowds are described in early Christian literature and in the Bible. When Jesus Christ drives the money changers out of the temple, this is typical behavior of an aggressive crowd. This is the same thing that they are doing now in the markets. But it is inspired by the idea and ennobled by the fact that it is the Bible. Early Christians, according to descriptions, staged such bacchanals of an aggressive crowd... In Italy there are statues stoned and destroyed temples. And the woman philosopher Hypatia, who was torn apart by Christian crowds... All this has been described since ancient times. In general, everything that is now considered pathology was quite normative in some other, early era. For example, the laws of the underworld and camps are a reproduction of those laws and norms that existed in primitive and medieval societies. It was quite normal to rob the weak. Racket! And the type of thinking of a criminal is a late analogue of those types of thinking and worldview that were characteristic of other eras. There are special, very striking comparative studies by ethnographers and criminologists. The crowd is the same phenomenon. Crowds are very easy to manipulate. It is much easier to manage than, say, a group. Lower criticality requires simpler techniques, but these techniques also need to be learned. The illusion of an uncontrollable crowd occurs when we try to approach the crowd as a group. Exhort, propagandize. I know tragic cases when a crowd went to beat some political figures, and they said: but we are for the people, we are with you! They were killed. Because if a group has degenerated into a crowd, then this is not the time to promote, other methods are needed.
— Do they teach these techniques in Russia?
“We taught this to Africans, Latin Americans, Asians, and Europeans. Ours were not trained. However, in Russia there are also people who do this.
- Where are they? I called the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Directorate, asked a question about methods of influencing the crowd, and they told me: girl, it’s impossible to work with the crowd! She's irrational! Only water cannons!
“It’s too bad that they think that way.” Water cannons can sometimes help, but well-timed music of a certain rhythm may work better.
— After the events at Manezhnaya, many frightening publications appeared. Did someone really organize that “football” pogrom on purpose?
— After these events, journalists began calling me: “Was this a provocation?” I tell them - no, I don’t see any signs of provocation. There was a mood of aggression, frustration, a provocative video... I don’t think they launched it on purpose. Usually I consider versions with villains last. Both personal and social misfortunes are most often to blame for stupidity, not villainy... So, when aggression increases, a person begins to look for an enemy. At worst, a Japanese or a black man. This is spontaneous behavior. By the way, as I was told, quite decent pensioners followed those who broke windows, laughed and said: this serves you right, bourgeois.
But journalists are very fond of the Manichaean scheme - this is when every evil has its own source. If I get sick, it means someone cursed me or put the evil eye on me. This is basic, primitive human thinking. The Manichaeans argued with St. Augustine: whether evil has its source and whether all evil has its source in the machinations of the devil. Remember the horrors of the late Middle Ages, when all misfortunes were explained by the machinations of witches and young and beautiful women were drowned. By the way, do you know why there are more beautiful women in Russia than in Western Europe?
- What, you didn’t have time to drown?
- In Russia, old women were considered witches. And in Europe this was the case for both Protestants and Catholics. Who is to blame for the epidemic? God is angry because a beautiful, flirtatious woman lives nearby, and we tolerate it instead of thinking about God. The Jews were buried alive, then they began to kill doctors who said: there is an epidemic, there is no need to kiss the cross. Well, at least a few scientists died, and beautiful girls were completely killed... So this is a common story - to find someone to blame. Interviewed by Anastasia NARYSHKINA |
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