Much of the reasoning behind mob mentality appears to be well understood. At a political rally or sporting event, participants can hide behind anonymity — something that is much more easy to do over the internet.
Responsibility plays a factor too. Being part of a mob, however unruly, the guilt can be dispersed fairly easily. It’s much easier to deal with if you don’t have to bear the burden of it on your own. Both of these factors, however, are a bit too subjective to be measured by science, so Cikara and her team decided to look elsewhere: the individual’s sense of self. Could it contract when you’re rooting for your favorite sports team?
Fortunately for Cikara, measuring one’s sense of self is easier than it sounds. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor the brains of their participants. It turns out, when you think about yourself — planning your weekend or fantasizing about driving your new car, the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex lights up. It also goes dormant when you’re in a group with your co-workers working on a project, or playing basketball. In this test, the subjects were asked several questions about morality — both as individuals and when competing as a group.
The medial prefrontal cortex was more inactive in some participants than others, particularly during the group questions. Those with lower levels of activity tended to be the least friendly. Following the questions, participants were then asked to select pictures of their teammates as well as members of the opposing team that would appear in the published paper.
The people who showed the least amount of self-reflection picked the most flattering images of themselves, while choosing the ugliest pictures of their opponents. They also had difficulty recalling the questions they were asked when doing a follow-up assessment. Cikara suspects it’s because the questions asked them about their own morality, something they weren’t closely paying attention to at the time of the first survey.
“It’s been hard to get a direct handle on the extent to which people within a group are tapping into their own understanding of things versus the group’s understanding,” said David Rand, a Yale University psychologist who was not involved with the study. “This is a nice way of using neuroimaging to try to get insight into something that behaviorally has been really hard to explore.” It leaves a few questions to answer — mainly, why do we act the way we do in a crowd? There’s plenty of peaceful protests that never turn violent — and in a group that acts out violently, there’s always those that are more guilty than others.
Researchers at Leeds University decided to investigate what happens when people find themselves engulfed in a crowd. Dr. Jens Krause, a behavioral ecologist, and Ph.D. student John Dyer had several groups of randomly assorted people walk up and down a large campus hallway. The only rules: Group members were not allowed to communicate with each other (no talking or signaling by hand), and stay within arms-length of the person next to you. Out of each group, a chosen few were provided with detailed information on how and where to walk. Eventually, the rest of the crowd began to emulate their movement.
“We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” said Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realize they were being led by others.”
The experiments became more elaborate, with crowds of up to 200 people moving in snakelike formations. It only took as few as 5 percent of informed participants to lead the crowd. Krause also tried moving the position of the informed few, to determine if where they were located had an effect on how long it took for the crowd to organize. The larger the crowd, the fewer individuals it took to have an impact on leadership.
While the results may sound unsettling for some, Krause saw the immediate benefits that this research could have, “At one extreme, it could be used to inform emergency planning strategies and at the other, it could be useful in organizing pedestrian flow in busy areas.”
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
