The Psychology of Crowd Dynamics Startseite（人群的心理动力学Startseite）.pdf

The Psychology of Crowd Dynamics Stephen Reicher School of Psychology University of St. Andrews Address for correspondence: Stephen Reicher, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland. KY 16 9QS. Tel.: +44 (0) 1334 463057. Fax.: +44 (0) 1334 462072. E-mail: sdr@st-andrews.ac.uk 1. The challenge of crowd psychology Crowds are the elephant man of the social sciences. They are viewed as something strange, something pathological, something monstrous. At the same time they are viewed with awe and with fascination. However, above all, they are considered to be something apart. We may choose to go and view them occasionally as a distraction from the business of everyday life, but they are separate from that business and tell us little or nothing about normal social and psychological realities . Such an attitude is reflected in the remarkable paucity of psychological research on crowd processes and the fact that it is all but ignored by the dominant paradigms in social psychology. The second edition of The Handbook of Social Cognition (Wyer Srull, 1994) has no entry in the index under ‘crowd’. Indeed, within a discipline that often views literature from a previous decade as hopelessly outdated, the little reference that is made to such research still tends to focus on Gustave Le Bon’s work from a previous century (Le Bon, 1895). As we shall shortly see, it is most clearly reflected in the content of Le Bon’s research and that of his followers. It was Le Bon, in terms of his theories if not his practices, who divorced crowds from their social context. His theory assumed that crowd participaton extinguishes our normal psychological capacities and reveal a primal nature which is usually well hidden from view. It was he who, with typical Victorian gusto, consigned crowds to the realms of a social scientific theatre of curiosities (cf. Reicher, 1996a