Kim Mills: Over the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus why it’s so important to understand the psychology of group behavior. In many places, the course of the pandemic turned on how government leaders communicated with the public and whether people followed, ignored, or fought the advice of public health officials. The pandemic was a shock to most of us, but the behavioral questions it raised have long preoccupied psychologists: What makes people follow authority figures or reject them? How does group identity affect people’s behavior? Today we’re going to talk about these questions, and more broadly, the psychology of crowds and group behavior.
When people think about group behavior, the image that may come to mind is of mob mentality: the idea that people can get swept up in the madness of a crowd and lose their ability to reason and follow their own good judgment. But how accurate is that image? Do people behave differently in a group or a crowd compared with when they’re on their own? If so, how? What are the roles of leaders and followers in groups? What can we learn from reexamining some of the classic psychology studies on obedience and authority, such as the Milgram shock experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment? And what have we learned about collective behavior from the COVID-19 pandemic?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. Steven Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is an expert in group psychology and collective behavior and has studied how people behave in crowds, the factors that influence whether or not people obey authority figures, and how groups can be a force for social change. He is a member of SAGE, a behavioral science advisory committee that has advised the U.K. government throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. He also writes regularly for the public in outlets including The Guardian and the Conversation about how behavioral science can inform our understanding of social issues, such as pandemic behavior, crowd policing, authoritarianism and more. Dr. Reicher is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Dr. Reicher, thank you for joining me today.
Stephen Reicher, PhD: It’s a real pleasure to talk to you.
Mills: You’ve studied the psychology of group behavior for decades and over the past three years, you’ve thought a lot about group behavior during a pandemic. So given your knowledge of collective behavior, were you surprised at all about how it turned out?
Reicher: I mean, in some way, of course, the COVID pandemic was something unprecedented and something we’d never lived through in our lifetime. So there were many surprises about the virus, about the way it evolved, about behavior as well. I think two things that we learned, however, was first of all, often when people think about psychology, they think of it as a matter of individuals, individual behavior. They think of it less when it comes to societal issues and policy issues and so on. And yet during COVID, it became quite clear that the behavioral dimension was absolutely critical because certainly before we had a vaccine, the main way in which we could limit transmission of the virus was by keeping people physically apart. Now, that’s very difficult because we’re social beings and we learned how much we lose when we are apart. So the great dilemma of how could you keep people socially together while physically apart, I think that was a huge challenge and raised huge issues.
The second point was that there is a sense that when people behave in groups and crowds under stress, they tend not to be at their best, to put it very mildly. And so you already mentioned the notion of mobs, that crowds are irrational and destructive, and when it comes to emergencies, we have this image of panic. You can’t have a good Hollywood disaster film without people running for the exits and waving their hands in the air and blocking up the exits and making things even worse. Now, the interesting thing is that over the last three decades or so, research on behavior in emergencies actually shows a very different picture: that when you do get emergencies, when you do get disasters, actually people come together, people develop a sense of shared identity. We are in this together. And so they support each other and they help each other.
And if people die, often it’s not because they trample over each other in the scramble for the exits, it’s because they help each other and don’t leave as quickly as they can. You saw that in 9/11. I mean, as the firemen and firewomen rushed into the Twin Towers, an act of incredible bravery, they discovered that actually people were self-organizing and in many ways were organizing themselves and didn’t need the fire officers to help them. And that’s not unique.
We found the same in the U.K. when there were bombs in London and in 2005. So as I say, the literature challenges this notion of panic, shows that by and large people come together and support each other, and that resilience is not a quality that resides in particular individuals. It’s a quality that comes about between people when they start thinking in terms of we rather in terms of I. And albeit now disgraced, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo put it very well at the beginning when he said, “Look, this is a ‘we’ thing. It’s not an ‘I’ thing. Get your head around the weconcept.”
Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last 40 years or so, get my head around the we concept. That’s what I learned from COVID, and that’s what I think I’d learned before COVID helped me in terms of trying to understand what was going on.
Mills: How does anonymity affect people’s behavior in a crowd?
Reicher: I think that’s a really interesting question because it’s often the question that people ask. It’s often the question that was asked in classic crowd psychology. So the most famous of all crowd psychologist, a Frenchman with a name Gustave La Bon, who wrote a book in 1895 called The Crowd, which has been described as the most influential psychology text of all time, that not only describes or helped form the mass politics of the 20th and 21st centuries. He started his analysis from the assumption that people are anonymous in crowds, that they lose their sense of self, they lose their standards, and they become incapable of thinking. They become like sheep led by others, and also they revert to a more primitive self and behave destructively. And this notion, what Le Bon called submergence, was translated into modern social psychology through the notion of deindividuation, which asked the question, what happens when people are anonymous in groups? And many studies were done, which took people, which made them anonymous, which looked at their behaviors and generally came to the conclusion that people behave more negatively when nobody is watching them.
Now, there are a number of problems, but the most fundamental problem is this. It’s the wrong question, because when you look closely at crowds, people are not anonymous on in crowds. Most people go into crowds with people they know. There’s an old study by [inaudible], which shows that 77% of people in crowds go with friends, with acquaintances, with people they know from similar organizations. That many crowds, especially many of the riots which most concern people, were those of communities. And so what this question revealed was less what crowds do than the fact that those studying them were outsiders who had an outside perspective. To them, people were anonymous, even though if they weren’t anonymous to each other.
And that outside perspective, that lack of actually looking at what crowds were like, led to a whole series of fantasies and errors about the crowd. Early crowd psychology in a sense was a science based on the fantasies of outside observers who looked on crowds with fear because they thought the crowds would challenge the status quo, would challenge their dominance. So as I say, it’s an excellent question, not so much because it reveals something about crowds, but it reveals something about the fundamental problem of crowd psychology classically, which it was based on the perceptions of the outsider rather than the realities of what goes on in the crowd.
Mills: So in some sense then people are maybe clumping together with people who are like-minded. I mean, I’m thinking of, for example, what happened at the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill here in the United States. I mean, those people came together. Many of them knew each other even though they were anonymous to us. Some of them are not anonymous anymore. Or even just this past weekend where we saw the coronation of King Charles III, where people were organizing into people who were in favor of the monarchy and then the people who were yelling, “Not my king.” I mean, so is this what you’re talking about?
Reicher: Well, I spent my weekend, seven hours on Saturday in the rain, standing in those crowds, looking at those crowds. And yeah, there are many joys of crowds, but standing in the London drizzle for seven hours is not part of it, I have to say. If we go back to what I was saying about Le Bon and the classic assumption that what goes on in crowds is that people lose their identities, therefore lose their standards, lose control, it rooted in a particular sense of the self, that really core concept in psychology.
Often in psychology, we think about the self, we think about what makes me unique, what makes me different from you. And yet, if I was to ask any of your audience, if I was to ask you, who are you? You would tell me certain things about yourself. I’m friendly, I like cats, I’ve got gray hair, I’ve got no hair, whatever it would be. But you’d also tell me things about the group memberships to which you belong. You’d tell me you are a woman. You might tell me you are American. You might tell me I’m a Catholic. You might tell a whole series of group memberships. So our identity is actually much more complex. We have individual personal identities, which are about me and how I differ from you. We have group or social identities, which are about the groups to which I belong and how we differ from they.
So the core argument of the contemporary crowd psychologist say, “Look, Le Bon limited his view of the self to just the individual self. And his assumption was that if you lose the individual self, there’s nothing left.” What seems to be going on rather is what happens in crowds is that people shift from the personal self to the social self or social identity, from I to we, and they start acting in terms of the norms and the values of the group. So it’s not that you lose identity and lose control. You shift control to the norms and values of the group.
Now, certainly some groups have got appalling, pernicious values. Nazi crowds, genocidal, antisemitic, authoritarian and so on. But they weren’t mindless, they weren’t senseless, and the pathology was not a psychopathology, a loss of mind. It was much more a sociopathology. It was rooted in those values. So in a sense, to invoke Dickens, crowds are sometimes the best of worlds and sometimes they’re the worst of worlds. They act and they tell us about the values of a particular group. They tell us about who they see as their friends and who they see as their foes.
I remember reading a wonderful historical study. It was about crowd events that had happened in France over a hundred-year period, and they seem bizarre. People couldn’t understand them until you looked at the viewpoint of the laborers themselves. And the author, he says, the targets of crowds glitter in the eye of history as a measure of the laborist conception of society. So crowds always tell you something, and I think the crowds that assaulted the Capitol told you very clearly about a particular ideology and who they saw as their enemies and who they saw as their friends, and their targets were likewise differentiated in the offices they went into, the things they desecrated, and the things they left alone. So sometimes bad, sometimes destructive, but not mindless and not mad.
Mills: So what do these insights into crowd behavior tell us about how we could better police crowds?
Reicher: So one of the problems is that this classical view of crowds, this view of crowds as inherently dangerous, inherently mindless, inherently destructive, often leads to policing strategies that are indiscriminate and which assume that even if the people involved in crowds are okay, once they’re in crowds, they’re dangerous, which leads to a generalized repression of crowds.
You use tactics which, for instance, treat all crowd members the same, which sweep the street and knock aside anybody, whoever they are. Now, the danger with that is that I’ve already spoken about how we should think of crowds as groups, but often in a physical crowd, in a single physical crowd, you can have multiple psychological crowds or none at all. So for instance, if you have a physical crowd of people in a shopping street, they’re not necessarily a psychological crowd. They don’t have a sense of we. Or if you go to a football game, when I say football—
Mills: What we call soccer, yeah.
Reicher: Yes, soccer, and you mean something else, but it’s still in the same crowd. It’s the same physical crowd. But you’ve got different groups, supporters of one side, the other side, neutrals and so on. And often in political crowds, you get a whole series of different groups with different values, different aims, different intentions. Some might be to be disruptive, to be violent, to be dangerous. On the whole most aren’t.
Now the danger is that if you treat everybody the same. If the police assume that everyone is dangerous and treat everybody as dangerous, the danger is they can change the nature of the group composition and get the majority to side with the violent minority and say, “Well, look, the police are our enemy. The police are against us,” you see? And so we have developed forms of policing, which are about starting from the premise, not crowds are bad, let’s stop them, but let’s see what the crowd is trying to do. Let’s see what we can facilitate. Let’s get the crowd on our side against those who want to be violent.
And when you have facilitative policing, often you find that, number one, that the majority of crowds are on your side. And secondly, they self-police in ways that mean the police don’t have to intervene. And as police officers themselves will tell you, often the most effective forms of policing are where the police themselves don’t have to intervene, where they facilitate crowd self-policing.
Let me give you a concrete example of this from long ago, I think it was in 1987. I’ve been studying crowds for more years than I’d like to remember. And it was in the midst of the rise of the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-apartheid campaign. And there was a demonstration in the midst of London and people had thought there’d be about 10,000 people there. In the end, about 100,000 people turned up going to Trafalgar Square.
Now if you know London, you know that there’s a problem there because the South African Embassy is on Trafalgar Square. And there was beginning to be trouble. People were pressing up against the South African Embassy. It was a symbol of the enemy. There were beginning to be a few bricks thrown. There could have been a major riot, but there wasn’t. And the reason why there wasn’t was because Jesse Jackson at the time was the speaker. And as you know, Jesse Jackson was a charismatic, amazing speaker. And he united people by saying, “Look,” he said. “If there is a riot today, then tomorrow you won’t hear what’s wrong with apartheid. Tomorrow, you’ll hear what’s wrong with anti-apartheid protesters, that’s to the good of the South African regime. You’ll be helping the enemy,” he said. And he said, “Chant with me ‘Free Nelson Mandela.’” Everybody linked arms, chanted “Free Nelson Mandela,” and those who were trying to be violent were completely isolated.
So most people in the crowd don’t want violence and they know violence is going to be against them. And if you facilitate and work with them, you can use the crowd itself in order to avoid those forms of conflict. So we’ve been working for many years, in particular my colleague Clifford Scott, who is now doing a lot of work in the U.S. with the police to try and spread these ideas and don’t see a crowd as a problem, don’t see the crowd as inherently violent. Not only is that wrong, it’s dangerous. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mills: What about for people who are in crowds, whether they have gone to a sporting event or they’re going to a demonstration, are there things that they need to understand about crowd behavior that might make them safer in the event that something goes amock?
Reicher: Okay, so I’ve spoken to some extent so far about what you might call the cognitive shifts that happen in the crowd, that when you get into a crowd, what happens is you start thinking in terms of the norms and the values of the group, not your individual norms and values, but what characterizes our collective belief. And also in crowds, what matters is the good of the group. So you evaluate things in terms of group norms and values.
But those aren’t the only shifts that happen in a crowd. There is also a shift in social relations, and we’ve seen this in all sorts of fascinating ways. So when you are in a crowd and when people see each other as part of a shared identity, then people cease being other. They cease being, if you like, an impediment, a barrier to what you want to do. They become part of your extended self, they’re part of us, they’re with you, they help you achieve what you want to achieve.
And so you see all sorts of shifts towards intimacy. First of all, people trust each other more, people help each other more, people share things. They share sandwiches. They share goods in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise do. Years ago we did a study, a very simple study. It was a group rather than a crowd setting, but the logic is the same. We got people to smell sweaty t-shirts. Okay, disgusting, sweaty t-shirts. My son said to me, “Is that what you do for a job, dad?” and I had to admit it was. And on the t-shirt is emblazoned the symbol of either your university or a rival university. And when it’s the rival university, you find it disgusting. Your face puckers in disgust, you do it for a shorter time as you can. You rush over—we timed all these things. You rush over, you wash your hands with lots of soap. When it’s the in-group t-shirt, I won’t exactly say you like it, but you’re much more casual about it. You kind of sniff it for a bit. Stroll over.
Now the important thing there is that, if you think about it disgust is the social ordering emotion. I can be in a room with you if I hate you. I can’t be in a room with you if you disgust me. And so again, the loss of disgust is one of many dimensions which allows people to come together, to feel intimate, to feel friends. There’s an old anecdote that I rather like and we turned it into another experiment. The anecdote came from a British politician. He was talking about trains breaking down, something that happens very often in the U.K., I’m afraid. I learned also actually recently it happens in Germany as well. So that ruined my stereotypes of Germany. But nonetheless—now when you get on a train, often you are in a physical crowd, okay? You are crowded up against people, you are pressed against them. But you try and keep yourself psychologically separate. If you are reading your newspaper, you try not to look over somebody else’s shoulder and you are annoyed if somebody looks over your shoulder. You try to retain your personal space. But then the train breaks down and gradually you turn from an individual traveler into a commuter, part of a group up against the train company, which is inefficient. You start seeing that you’ve got something in common and people start talking to each other and they even share their sandwiches. And I’m talking about British people here, so this is pretty radical stuff I’m talking about. And we showed that happens in an experiment.
Now, the point I’m trying to make is that therefore in crowds, not only do you have the same perspective on the world, you join together, you support each other, you co-act. And that makes crowds powerful, because you’ve got a set of people working together to achieve the same thing. And often that allows you to do things you can’t do in everyday life.
Now, sometimes that’s oppositional. Sometimes you can challenge the police if you feel that the police stop you doing what you want to do. You are empowered. We also did work in a Hindu pilgrimage, the biggest crowd event in the world. It’s a event that happens at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in Allahabad in North India. It’s on a 12-year cycle. Every year about 5 million people go. Every sixth year, the half Mela, 20 million people go. The full Mela, the Kumbh Mela, every 12 years, 100 million people go in the month.
And on a single day I remember being there, and 20 million people are around you. The numbers are quite amazing. Now, the fascinating thing about the Mela is because it’s that people experience this vast number of people, which is incredibly noisy and incredibly dirty, incredibly unsanitary, as blissful. And they see it as blissful because they come together and people respect each other and give each other space to carry out their religious devotions, which is why they’re there.
So that sense of empowerment, of agency of I can do what I believe in, to me is at the core of the joy of crowds. And the irony is this, people often attack crowds because they say in crowds you lose yourself in the collective, you lose agency, you become a sheep. The reason why people enjoy and are so joyous in crowds is because of precisely the opposite.
And again, let me use a quotation I particularly like. And again, it’s from a different setting and it’s from a French historian called Georges Lefebvre who was writing about revolutionary crowds in the French Revolution of 1789. And he said, “Perhaps it is only in the crowd that we lose our petty day-to-day concerns and we become the subject of history.” We make history. And whether the history is your team winning the Super Bowl, or whether the history is you transforming the politics of your society, or whether the history is you being able to live a pure religious life, if you believe in it that’s utterly exhilarating. So the emotion of crowds, the joy of crowds, doesn’t show you that people are irrational. The joy of crowds is about people being able to turn their ideas into realities because they’re empowered. And that, for me makes crowds really fascinating things.
Mills: Well, when you were observing this religious event in India and there were so many people there, you weren’t sharing in the religious experience, right? You were there as a psychologist studying them. Were you alone? And how would that make you feel in a situation like that? Did you bring colleagues? I mean, I’m originally from New York, I have been in some seriously scary crowds covering the rededication of the Statue of Liberty many years ago. And I can tell you I got stuck in a crowd in Lower Manhattan and we were panicked because you had no control over where you were going. You had to go where the sea of humanity took you, and it’s kind of terrifying. How can you deal with that as a psychologist and even just as an individual citizen?
Reicher: Yeah. Well, I mean, when you look at accounts of danger in crowds, it is often when you are physically part of a crowd you’re not psychologically part of. So I’ve been part of several, say, football crowds. And I remember in the old days when a goal was scored, the crowd was such you’d physically be picked up and moved and put down somewhere else. And I remember that was a buzz. I mean, that was incredibly exciting. However, when I walk down the street and there’s a crowd there, I turn into a grumpy old man and I mutter and I hate it and I find it profoundly negative.
So I think it’s quite interesting how our experience of crowds is profoundly different as a function of whether we feel psychologically part of them or not. Now sometimes, however, the paradox is this, that if you are part of a crowd—let me step backwards, and mention a couple of other studies we’ve done.
So one of the simplest studies I ever did was we got people and we said to them, look, please arrange the chairs. You’re going to be talking to somebody, arrange a chair so you’ll feel comfortable. And the person they were going to talk to why was either in-group or out-group. We told them either it will be somebody from the same group as you or somebody. And they organized the chairs about 20% or 30% closer when it’s in-group than out-group. And during COVID, because the issue of physical proximity was a big issue there. We did similar studies and we showed that people don’t physically distance as much within group members. So there is an illusion of safety in groups.
Now, a colleague of mine, John Drury, did some fantastic studies in the Hajj, which is the pilgrimage to Mecca. Again, one of the biggest collective events in history, and one where tragically there have been a number of crushes, people have been killed. Now what we found was that the more that people identify as pilgrims, as Hajjis, then the more connections they find to others, the more they seek out the center of the crowd. You want to be at the center of the crowd. Just as if you’re into a band, you don’t want to be at the edge of the crowd. You want to be right in the center. So people seek out the center of the crowd and feel safest even when it’s dangerous.
So it is true that this psychological sense of safety with others who are in-group can lead you into danger. And similarly we found that when you feel that others are in-group, you might be more willing, for instance, to share. Drinks, food, makeup, whatever with them. And again, that can lead to the spread of the disease. So there are some paradoxical effects, where what is a psychological good can be a public health problem. And I think it’s important for people to be aware of those types of issues.
Mills: So I want to change gears for a minute and go back to something I mentioned in the introduction, which is the fact that you’ve studied two of the most famous experiments in all of psychology, both of which were on obedience and authority, Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments in the 1960s and the Stanford Prison Experiment in the early 1970s.
Our listeners who remember these from their Psychology 101 classes probably learned from these that people are surprisingly willing to obey authority figures blindly with no questioning even to the point of hurting or killing strangers. But in recent years, you and other researchers have argued that these experiments have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. Can you talk about that? What lessons did you take from these classic studies about obedience and authority?
Reicher: So let me come at this a couple of ways. First of all, let me step back to talk more generally about leadership, because I think leadership for us is critical to what happens in these two studies. Now, from our perspective, because we look at the way in which people behave in groups and we show how in crowds people seek to behave in ways that express their group identity, then the implication is that anyone who is in a position to tell you what it means to be a member of this group, what does it mean to be American in this context? What’s it mean to be a Catholic in this context or whatever, is in a position to influence our behavior.
In other words, leadership should be seen as a group process, where the leader influences us by telling us who we are. And when you begin to think about it, I mean leadership is always a group process. Somebody who people who belong to one group think is the most wonderful leader in the world, people who don’t belong to that group think is the most awful thing who has ever existed. That was true in the U.K. with Margaret Thatcher. Some people adored her, thought she was charismatic and wonderful, and other people just couldn’t see it. It’s happening of course today in the United States with Donald Trump, with some people thinking he is fantastic and can do no wrong and others thinking he can do no right. So very much leadership is a group process. It’s about defining who we are and what we should do.
So with that in mind, let me go back to these classic studies. And as you say, these studies are incredibly well known. If you ask people, if you ask students, for instance, the best known studies in all of psychology, not social psychology, all of psychology, they will say number one, Milgram, and number two, Zimbardo. When I teach about these things, and I have taught teachers, I’ve taught police officers, I’ve taught army personnel, all sorts of groups, about 60% or 70% of them know of these studies. They might not know the name, but when you say, “Do you remember these studies where they gave you electric shocks if you made errors?” And they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I know about those.” So they’re very, very well known.
And the third thing to be said about them is the mythology has in a sense preceded the fact in terms of what actually happened. So let me start with Milgram. And what we learned from Milgram is somebody’s brought into the laboratory for what they think is a memory experiment. They told this is a really important study, and we’re trying to find out how punishment impacts learning. These are the first studies, and this will help us understand how to get people to learn. So what you’ve got to do is to teach somebody this word list and then test them. And each time they make an error, give them an electric shock, and each time the electric shock will increase by 15 volts, 15, 30, 45, 60. How far will they go? That was the question Milgram started with.
He didn’t know what the answer was. He didn’t think people would go very far. In fact, he asked people beforehand. And whether they were ordinary people, students, or whether they were experts, psychiatrists, they said that nobody will go all the way. Nobody will go to 450 volts. Nobody will murder someone because they make errors on a learning experiment. Of course, the shocks weren’t real, nobody was being hurt, but they believed they were.
And what he found in the so-called classic baseline study, which is actually called the revised baseline study, was that 65% of people went all the way to 450 volts. Two-thirds of people would murder someone from making an error on a learning experiment. And this was in 1961, okay? The same time that the architect of the Holocaust, the man who deported people for death camps, Adolf Eichmann, at precisely the same time he was in trial in Jerusalem. So the two events came together to shape our understanding. And our understanding up to then had been what’s wrong with them, right? What’s wrong with these people who can kill in Nazi Germany? Surely they must be different from you or me.
And what Milgram to some extent, what happened with Eichmann and Hannah Arendt’s famous book on Eichmann seemed to show was actually we could do it. You or I could do it. So the question becomes what would we do in those circ*mstances? And that’s much more disturbing. It’s much easier if you can put it onto someone else rather than look at yourself. So for me, Milgram studies are incredibly important. I might challenge some of the interpretations, but the way in which he got us to look at probably the most significant event, certainly of the 20th century, in a completely different way and change our psychological understanding of it, I think is incredibly important.
So I am very well aware that we are standing on giant shoulders. I’m not trying to debunk Milgram or attack Milgram. I’m saying what he did was incredibly important, but does his explanation stand up? Now, Milgram’s explanation, he claims he takes from Arendt’s book on Eichmann and her concept of the banality of evil. And he says, “Look, people fall into an agentic state, which means they want to be a good follower. They want to carry out the experimenter’s instructions. And they’re so focused on that, those banal motives of wanting to be approved of by the experimenter, by the authority figure. They’re so focused on that they don’t notice what they’re doing. They don’t notice that they’re imposing such harm.”
Now, even Milgram’s fans—and actually I’m one of his fans, but even those who are critical, say, “Look, really, this explanation doesn’t stand up.” It doesn’t stand up for all sorts of reasons. One is there is a film—one of the reasons why Milgram studies are so famous is because he filmed them. And in the film you can see this figure struggling as he goes through the experiment wondering, “should I continue asking questions,” being torn. This isn’t somebody who’s unaware of what’s happening. This is somebody who’s torn apart by what he’s being asked to do, which on the one hand he knows is wrong, somebody’s being harmed. But on the other hand, he thinks he’s doing something good and scientifically important.
So it doesn’t stand up for that reason. It doesn’t stand up because despite the fact that we remember that the Milgram study is people go all the way. Remember two-thirds go all the way in the one study, which means that a third don’t. And if everybody fell into an agentic state, how do you explain that? Secondly, Milgram did 30 variants of his studies. He tried to tease apart when would it happen. And across all of these studies, actually people disobey 58% of the time. So these are not studies of obedience. They’re studies of obedience and disobedience. And when you come to ask, “Well, why did behavior vary?” what begins to become apparent, and we’ve shown this, is that the conditions where people are less likely to obey tend to be ones where the authority figure is less legitimate and you’re less likely to identify with him. It always was a man.
So in one variant of the study, or in most variants of the study, they’re done in Yale. So you have a prestigious Yale academic. In one—it’s done in downtown Bridgeport in sort of a dusty commercial building. And so it’s less legitimate. You’re less likely to identify. And so we argue that what’s going on here is not that you don’t know what’s happening, it’s that you are actually placed between two different moralities.
You have an experimenter who tells you, “Look, what you are doing is good. What you are doing is progressive. What you are doing helps society by helping us understand learning. And it’s very important that you continue with this experiment.” So on the one hand, you genuinely think you’re doing something good and worthwhile. But on the other hand, a different voice, the voice of the learner is telling you, “You’re hurting me. You’re harming me. You’ve got no right to do this to me.”
So you are placed between these two voices, which one do you listen to? And the more that the experimenter can persuade you to identify with him and identify with a scientific enterprise, then the more that you will be a willing follower. And the more that you identify with the victim, the less you will follow the experimenter. So it’s an act of leadership, of leadership of trying to get you to identify with the experimenter and with a scientific cause. And the more that, as I say, the experimenter is successful in that, the more harm will be done.
And so the point is this, people don’t commit harm because they’re unaware of it. They’re perfectly aware of it. Eichmann was perfectly aware of the fact he was deporting people to Auschwitz to die. No, it’s because you are persuaded that what you are doing serves the greater good. And often when you look at history, at the most obscene of regimes, the most extreme of actions, they argue that they are serving a greater good. I mean, the Nazis did that as well. The Nazis attempted to argue that they were pursuing a particular form of morality, that Germany was seen as a good, that Germany was seen as embodying virtues, that Germany was about cleanliness, and that they were eliminating what they constituted as threats to that. So when they talk about racial hygiene, they met meant it literally.
Now, these are obscene ideas, but you can only challenge them if you understand how they work. And time and again, you get similar arguments. And we see arguments today which justify doing harm on the basis of the greater good and identifying with a greater good cause. So as I say, we hope that our work and our reinterpretation of that incredibly powerful phenomenon that Milgram displayed to us will make us more aware of when we too are following those dangerous steps to doing harm in the name of the greater good.
Mills: Let me close by asking you about the coronation that you just attended since you spent so many hours out there in the rain. Did you see anything that you didn’t expect? I mean, clearly you were there studying as well as participating. What was that like for you, and what were your observations?
Reicher: Well, I love crowds, and one of the things I always say about being an academic is the great thing about an academic life is people pay you to study about things that you find interesting. So I find crowds fascinating. And so I can go to a football crowd, I can go to a political rally, I can go to the coronation, and I can say I’m collecting data. And that’s a huge privilege, and it’s a huge pleasure.
See, I started my study of crowds in 1980. I was doing my PhD, doing my doctorate, sitting in the labs doing social influence experiments when the first of the British urban riots of the 1980s happened, St. Paul’s riots. I found it fascinating, and it so challenged these notions of a mad mob, which were in all the newspapers the next day that it set me on a course of study, and I’m still going there. But for most of my life, I’ve been interested in protest crowds and how crowds challenge the status quo. But what we underestimate, I think, is the role of, if you like, establishment crowds, crowds which affirm the status quo, crowds which help create the identities by which we live our lives.
So one of the things that fascinate me, I studied the crowds around the queen’s mourning, the queen’s death, then the coronation. And they, I think, are very important in helping create a sense of Britishness and to redefine that sense of Britishness. So although not everybody who went for the mourning, and although not everybody who went to the coronation was a royalist, many people were there because it was an interesting thing. It was a historic event. They went to be with others. They went because they were tourists. It was seen as a huge crowd of people who supported the monarchy and therefore affirmed a particular version of Britishness.
At a time where Britain is not doing desperately well in the world post-Brexit, it gave a sense of pride. Look at the way we choreograph these things. Look at the ways in which we are linked to history. Look at the ways in which other countries look at us. And in that sense, it increased the sense of national identification and the sense of national pride.
So I am fascinated, and we’ve collected the data. We haven’t fully analyzed it yet because it only happened a few days ago, in the ways in which crowds not only act on the basis of preexisting identities, but the way in which crowds form the everyday identities by which we live. You see, the notion of crowds by and large has been they are an eruption of something primitive into contemporary life. They are like Victorian freak shows. They’re fascinating, but they’re not really relevant to the real stuff of psychology and society.
For me crowds, both theoretically but also practically, tell you about those basic processes which define who we are and how we relate to others, and what we should do, and how we feel. And I think in studying coronation crowds and mourning crowds and the ways in which these crowds help consolidate a particular understanding of our national identities, that contributes to our understanding that crowd psychology should be very much at the center of psychology and the center of this understanding of society.
Mills: Well, I think you’ve just made a very compelling case, and I want to thank you for joining me today, Dr. Reicher. It’s been really interesting.
Reicher: It’s been great to talk to you. Thank you.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org, or on Apple, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
