I’m taking a crack at this subject. No one, to my knowledge, has done a good job. The subject matter has many names which is evidence that it isn’t understood. Mass hysteria, Collective action, Mass psychology, Crowd psychology and many other terms. The best summary, I’ve found, of descriptions and theories is here.
I have personally been in the Dan White riot, many sit-ins, the Diablo Canyon protest and half a dozen protest parades. The most impressive was a protest near the Concord Naval Base where about 40 people, in a crowd of hundreds, tore up 100 feet of railroad tracks, by hand, and piled the tracks and ties in neat stacks with no supervision or tools.
I have also been on the outside of several hysterias where vast numbers of people held contra-factual opinions: 1980’s child abduction view that hundreds of thousands of child abductions were underway, the satanic rituals carried out in nursery schools, the recovered memory hysteria of the early 1990s and the most recent pervasive, long lasting human caused global warming and apocalypse religious movement.
There must be some human form of interaction that relates to these phenomena that needs explanation. It may be one or many processes.
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The first observation in my experience is the 80% rule. People can not live in an environment where 80% of their own views are inconsistent with the group they associate with. A Democrat living in a Republican neighborhood will become a Democrat, over time, unless he surrounds himself with many friends who agree with him on most issues. Which confirms the model.
This is a description not an explanation. The explanation is tribalism. Humans are tribal animals like other animals and need the tribe for survival. It may be a learned function or a genetic function. From observing animals, including domesticated animals that become feral I lean towards a genetic explanation
- From my social thought work I have found that all institutions are built on over-riding metaphors. The most famous metaphor is that markets are guided by an ‘invisible hand.’ Thus when free markets are observed there is an automatic human assumption of an active principle at work. Many institutional metaphors are based on ‘the family’ with a parent as the top leader and protector.
This again is a description not an explanation. The explanation is that the human mind has many worldviews that are largely cultural and these worldviews have a hierarchy of sub-views. When a group accepts the overarching worldview then the members subscribe to the inherent sub-structures. Thus, the global warming religious worldview has sub-views that lead to recycling and bicycle riding as moral imperatives.
Social thought is a structure of our mind, part of the way we are trained to think. Much as language has a part of our brain (Broca’s cluster) so the brain has similar parts that organize worldviews into structures with defined sub-structures. Our culture provides these worldviews and structures.
- Our vocabulary has a structure as well. George Lakoff explains this in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. The word ‘over’ contains the concepts of ‘up,’ ‘across,’ ‘on top of’ and ‘finished.’ The word ‘above’ is a cone such that a satellite can be ‘above’ the Golden Gate Bridge as it moves through the cone at 200 miles in space.
Thus our language gives us structures that we use in constructing our worldviews. Words give us directions and metaphors including the words ‘seize,’ ‘burn,’’loot’ and ‘riot.’
- Our reptilian brain gives us directions in the simple form of ‘fight or flee.’ Which can combine in dangerous behavior in a crowd during a fire in an enclosed space. Fellow humans can be trampled.
The reptilian brain, the basal ganglia, is directly in control of bodily movements.
The amygdala is another part of the brain that contributes directly to behavior, paranoid behavior according to Dr. Ronald K Siegel. Paranoia is often part of human collective behavior.
All these parts of the brain, (basal ganglia and amygdala) seem to play a direct role in collective behavior and probably play a role in communicating with other people nearby. As in a crowd. The brain is shaped to a large degree by genes. There is also an overlay of restraint that comes from our culture.
When we look at a crowd we can see the people as individuals but the reality is that there is a collective culture in which these people are embedded. That culture provides hierarchical worldviews with associated metaphors, language with an implicit conceptual structure and biological imperatives that are built into our brains and genes.
Multi-human behaviors should not be surprising or hard to explain. We are very much alike and we have myriad conscious and unconscious ways of communicating with each other.
We don’t really know much about our unconscious forms of communicating that allow crowds to function collectively.
The only confirmed form of unconscious communication that I know is eye-blinking. Higher status people blink much less than lower status people. Higher status people can see this but lower status people can’t. Higher status people can recognize each other as a consequence.
Horses, dogs and other domesticated animals can put humans in the role of their alpha leader. There are signals that make this possible, animals respond to these signals but we don’t know the signals.
There must be many similar human forms of interpersonal communication that make collective behavior function. We don’t know much about them at present.
Summary: Unsurprisingly humans in a multi-human situation have a vast common identity to direct their behavior as evidenced by our knowledge of social thought and language. How that communication occurs remains unknown. When it is known we shall find collective behavior to be readily understandable.