In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.
Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants.
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In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him were grabbing cameras from the electronics …show more content…
Loukaitis was obsessed with Stephen King’s novel “Rage” (written under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman), about a high-school student who kills his algebra teacher with a handgun. Kip Kinkel, on the morning of his attack, played Wagner’s “Liebestod” aria over and over. Evan Ramsey’s father thought his son was under the influence of the video game Doom. The parents of several of Michael Carneal’s victims sued the makers and distributors of the movie “The Basketball
On March 17, 1955, more than 10,000 crazed hockey fans from inside the Montreal Forum and from the streets outside gathered together to protest the suspension of Maurice "The Rocket" Richard. An outraged fan slapped and punched the president of the National Hockey League, Clarence Campbell who was quietly sitting among the spectators. This "seven-hour rampage of destruction and looting" was a result of this attack that occurred during the game that opposed the Montreal Canadians and the Detroit Red Wings (Zacharias, 2000). During this riot, there were many people who were injured and over 100 fans were arrest.
LGBTQIA stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual. The LGBTQIA topic is still an issue in society. There are people who are still against it. Some people in society still see this topic as a negative thing. The Stonewall riots was an important event for the LGBTQIA community. Stonewall is where the gay rights movement started. The transgender community is an important part of the LGBTQIA community. Same sex marriage was an important event that happened and impacted people of the community. The LGBTQIA community has many influential people like Laverne cox and Caitlyn Jenner. The L and G stands for lesbian and gay which means you are attracted to the same sex. The B stands for bisexual which means you are
In a reality where the government strives to establish total equality, there are bound to be an immense amount of rebels and protesters who questions the newly established system. It is expected for the mass majority of individuals to be demeaning the so-called “equality” and demanding for change. However, this interpretation is far from the case in the fictional text “Harrison Bergeron”, where there appears to be daily brainwashing of the population, as well as law enforcement through putting bullets through people’s heads. The allegory attempts to depict a world where the government’s primary focus is to ensure that each and every individual is absolutely equivalent to one another. Taking place in 2081 America, there are several
The American Behavioral Scientist, 44(12), 2252-2268. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/214769221?accountid=45049. Gray, M. (2014). The 'Standard'. The L.A. riots: 15 years after Rodney King.
The beating of Rodney King from the Los Angeles Police Department on March 3, 1991 and the Los Angeles riots resulting from the verdict of the police officers on April 29 through May 5, 1992 are events that will never be forgotten. They both evolve around one incident, but there are two sides of ethical deviance: the LAPD and the citizens involved in the L.A. riots. The incident on March 3, 1991 is an event, which the public across the nation has never witnessed. If it weren’t for the random videotaping of the beating that night, society would never know what truly happened to Rodney King. What was even more disturbing is the mentality the LAPD displayed to the public and the details of how this mentality of policing led up to this particular incident. This type of ethical deviance is something the public has not seen since the civil rights era. Little did Chief Gates, the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the LAPD know what the consequences of their actions would lead to. Moving forward in time to the verdict of those police officers being acquitted of the charges, the public sentiment spiraled into an outrage. The disbelief and shock of the citizens of Los Angeles sparked a mammoth rioting that lasted for six days. The riots led to 53 deaths and the destruction of many building. This is a true but disturbing story uncovering the ethical deviance from the LAPD and the L.A. riots. The two perspectives are from the Rodney King incident are the LAPD and the L.A. riots.
What were the causes of the prison riots in the 1990`s and how effective was the government response?
Public conflict may be triggered by several causes. For one, it may result from the agitation of several groups who believe that what is morally right is violated. Despite the reason behind, agitators seek to challenge the society so that their proposal for social change is accepted. Hence, it is important to understand the reasons why agitators use different strategies to advance their cause and how establishments can control them. For the purposes of this paper, the Boston Tea Party will be analyzed in light of the concept of agitation and establishment. Further, the strategies of the agitators and the establishment will also be provided.
...r the same cause. These riots had so much power that eventually they were “brought into the workforce to hold jobs from which they had previously been excluded” (Weisser). The behaviors of large groups are what identify the mob mentality of a crowd; it gives power to society, just as the community experiences as the result of the annual lottery.
Firstly, (re-presentation) the media language used to describe the initial events of the riots was exaggerated. Strong words/phrases like, “Anarchy”, “The Battle Of London”, and “the rule of the mob” or “Police and the riot blunders” were the headlines on widely distributed newspapers. These exaggerated headlines make it seem as if that there was a political motive behind these riots and that the riots were planned attacks (rebellion) to take over the country’s capital. Furthermore, the rioters were described as young and opportunist people who were benefiting from the looting. The media also reported the different types of merchandise the looters had obtained in the course of the riots. Images of looters posing in front of the merchandize they had obtained were shown in the media and this tempted others to participate in the riots as well because the merchandise looked so easy to
The Watts Riots was a race riot that took place in Los Angeles in August 11th through the 17th in 1965. The Watts Riot, which screamed and acted violently for six days which ended with about forty million dollars worth of damage, resulting to be the largest and most expensive city-based fighting against authority of the Civil Rights time in history. The riot helped from the event on August 11, 1965 when Marquette Frye, a black traveler, was pulled over and arrested by Lee W. Minikus. Strained forces between police officers and the crowd erupted in a violent exchange. The outbreak of brutal rebellion that followed Frye's arrest immediately touched off a large riot centered in the commercial section of the riot, a deeply extremely poor African American neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. For many days, rioters burned everything in sight and robbed and damaged department stores, grocery stores, and anything they could damage. Over the course of the six days, over 14,000 California National Guard troops were made ready for action in South Los Angeles and a curfew zone including ...
Though Americans have done their best to uphold the ideals and promises that this country was founded upon, there have been times when these principles were abandoned. Throughout America’s history, Jefferson’s ideals have been violated. “Succumbing to bad advice and popular opinion, President Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 ordering the relocation of all Americans of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps in the interior of the United States.” During this time, Japanese-Americans were stripped of their rights, forcing them out of their homes and treating them horribly in ‘concentration camps.’ Despite many of these Japanese-Americans posing no threat or possibility of allegiance to Japan they were ostracized; treated
This kind of social issue is more evident when episodes with violence are trending topics. For example, during and after the September 11th’s attack in New York, many Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians, were subject to revisions and detentions because authorities had no clue about how those mentioned attacks were perpetrated and who did them. It was not just a matter concerning authorities, society in general condemned hardly to the entire eastern community, even though many of that people stopped, detained, and questioned, did not have any linkage with this terrorist event.
In the teleplay “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” written by Rod Serling, a small street in a suburban American town falls into chaos after they lose all electricity, and in an effort to find the monsters responsible, they become animals. They search for a scapegoat and let their imagination et the best of them because “for a moment their fear almost turns their walk into a wild stampede, but Steve's voice, loud, incisive, and commanding, makes them stop. ‘Wait a minute...wait a minute! Let's not be a mob!’ The people stop as a group, seem to pause for a moment, and then much more quietly and slowly start to walk across the street. ” (Rod Serling ?). The residents of Maple Street fall victim to herd mentality. They rush to find the culprit and they lose all sense of moral and judgement. As they are about to become a mob they listen to Steve as he advises that they do not. All the residents of Maple Street listen to him and sure, he did use mob mentality to do good, but it goes to show the amount of power one man holds. Similarly, in the article “Why People Follow The Crowd” written by ABC News, the article discusses how humans are willing to let go of their beliefs, morals, and
On June 28, 1969, an event occurred that was to be the start of one of the most powerful movements in US history. On that Friday in June, the New York police force raided a popular bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn because it was suspected of operating without a liquor license. Raids usually went on undisturbed by people involved, but during this raid the area around the inn exploded into fierce protest. The repercussions and multiple disputes that resulted from the initial raid would come to be known as the Stonewall Riots.
...te police officers of charges stemming from the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. As a result of this verdict, thousands of citizens rioted for six days. Mass amounts of looting, murder, arson and assault took place.” Riots are one of the most common forms of mob mentality and are shown in this book several times.