The kindness of crowds
From “The Kindness of Crowds,” Economist, 28 February 2009, pg. 83-84:
According to a much-reported survey carried out in 2002, Britain then had 4.3 million closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras – one for every 14 people in the country. That figure has since been questioned, but few doubt that Britons are closely scrutinized when they walk the streets. This scrutiny is supposed to deter and detect crime. Even the government’s statistics, though, suggest that the cameras have done little to reduce the worst sort of criminal activity, violence.
That may, however, be about to change, and in an unexpected way. It is not that the cameras and their operators will become any more effective. Rather, they have accidentally gathered a huge body of data on how people behave, and particularly on how they behave in situations where violence is in the air. This means that hypotheses about violent behavior which could not be tested experimentally for practical or ethical reasons, can now be examined in a scientific way. And it is that which may help violence to be controlled.
One researcher who is interested in this approach is Mark Levine, a social psychologist at Lancaster University in Britain who studies crowds. Crowds have a bad press. They have been blamed for antisocial behavior through mechanisms that include peer pressure, mass hysteria and the diffusion of responsibility – the idea that “someone else will do something, so I don’t have to.” But Dr. Levine thinks crowds can also diffuse potentially violent situations and that crime would be much higher if it were not for crowds. As he told a symposium called “Understanding Violence,” which was organized by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland earlier this month, he has been using CCTV data to examine the bystander effect, an alleged phenomenon whereby people who would help a stranger in distress if they were alone, fail to do so in the presence of others. His conclusion is that it ain’t so. In fact, he thinks, having a crowd around often makes things better.
...[Dr. Levine’s] first observation was that bystanders frequently intervene in incipient fights. The number of escalating gestures did not rise significantly as the size of the group increased, contrary to what the bystander effect would predict. Instead, it was the number of de-escalating gestures that grew. A bigger crowd, in other words, was more likely to suppress a fight....
...Levine talks of a “collective choreography” of violence, in which the crowd determines the outcome as much as the protagonist and the target do, and he is now taking his ideas into the laboratory... Virtual reality may thus allow Dr. Levine to understand the collective choreography of violence better than he does now, but he is already convinced that, despite the moral panic over violence in Britain today, the influence of groups is largely benign. His work could have practical consequences, since police generally aim to break crowds up. If he is right, that approach may unintentionally lead to more fights.
Monday, April 6, 2009