Two Explanations of the Behaviour of Crowds

Describe & Evaluate Two Explanations of the Behaviour of Crowds

When people are alone, their behaviour can be different to when they are part of a crowd, and sometimes this change in behaviour can even lead to violence. When you consider that crowds exist in nearly all walks of life, such as work, sports and general social life, this can become a problem, so why is it that a persons behaviour does in fact change?

There have been many studies in conjunction with crowd behaviour and they often fall into the category of conformity. An example of a highly respected experiment to do with conformity was carried out by Asch. It involved showing participants a set of two cards. On one of the cards, there was a line, whilst on the other card, there was a three lines, one of which was identical to that on the other card. The experiment proceeded by Asch asking participants to say aloud which line out of the three matched the single line on the other card. He found that when the participants were alone and were asked to decide, they all answered correctly by matching the two lines. So, it was then that Asch decided to change the settings of the experiment. This time around, he made the participants group together, but did it in a way that outcast one of the groups members in a way that the rest of the groups participants were now accomplices trying to catch out the naïve participant.

It was the job of the accomplishes to all shout out the wrong answer when asked to do so, in the view that it was thought that the naïve participant would then conform to the group decision. The results of the experiment showed that 74% of the naïve participants agreed with the incorrect group decision, even when the answer was undoubtedly obvious. In conclusion to his findings, Asch thought of three explanations to why people did in fact conform. Firstly there were the participants that genuinely believed that there own answer was correct, secondly there were the participants that may have felt that there own prediction was incorrect due to past experiences, for example, a history of bad eye sight could lead to uncertainty, and finally, there were those participants that agreed with the group solely because they could not bare to be in the individual minority.

In accordance with the above experiment, Crutchfield ’55, carried out a similar experiment because he felt that that Asch’s face to face experiment could not provide a stable enough conclusion for conformity.