Argument that people are helpless
Interesting post, though the implication is that people are helpless to resist a descent into a mindless mob. I wonder: I think that some people would be less apt to join an unthinking mob, and probably it would be a good idea to find out why, so that more people can gain such an ability. David McRaney writes at You Are Not So Smart:
The Misconception: People who riot and loot are scum who were just looking for an excuse to steal and be violent.
The Truth: You are are prone to losing your individuality and becoming absorbed into a hivemind under the right conditions.
When a crowd gathers near a suicidal jumper something terrible is unleashed.In Seattle in 2001, a 26-year-old woman who had recently ended a relationship held up traffic for a little too long as she considered the implications of leaping to her death. As motorists began to back-up on the bridge and become irate, they started yelling “Jump, bitch, jump!” until she did.
Cases like this aren’t unusual.
In 2008, a 17-year old man jumped from the top of a parking garage in England after 300 or so people chanted for him to go for it. Some took photos and recorded video before, during and after. Afterward, the crowd dispersed, the strange spell broken. The taunters walked away wondering what came over them. The other onlookers vented their disgust into social media.
In San Francisco, in 2010, a man stepped onto the ledge of his apartment window and contemplated dropping from the building. A crowd gathered below and soon started yelling for him to jump. They even tweeted about it. He died on impact fifteen minutes later. . .
Continue reading. The behavior described is (to my mind) very bad behavior, and I have a hard time believing that anyone with a shred of empathy could call for the death of someone simply in order to get to work on time. To reveal my own biases, I believe that people who cheer for someone to kill themselves have revealed something quite ugly about themselves, not about the human race. Assuming free will, of course.
However, it is a long post, and several studies are quoted. The studies on children are interesting, but those are studies of immature individuals who have not yet seriously considered their moral code and thought at length about ethical behavior.
Moreover, Halloween, dressing up, and shedding my identity: very little appeal for me. Mardi Gras? No, thank you. I don’t like crowds in the first place, possibly because I don’t like the possibility of deindividuation. Indeed, the sensible course would seem to me to avoid deindividuation.
