Once upon a time, at this very self-same time of year, a tiny starling flew in through my classroom window in Nanjing’s Xianlin. It began to flap a frantic, feathery circle around the room; some of the kids ducked their heads as it passed, but really, it was so tiny, so insignificant, the starling was far more terrified than any of the students. Until, that is, I managed to fill my lungs and let fly.
The scream activated my paralysed legs, and the distance to the room across the corridor has never been covered so fast, neither before nor after. My class in tow, the class across the way quite reasonably assumed that we were being pursued by an axe murderer, and a delicious bout of hysteria ensued. Thankfully, my colleague does not suffer from ornithophobia, and quickly dispatched the plumed beast.
Many years have passed, I am almost recovered, and yet, this five-minute frenzy has stuck with me ever since as a salient example of how easily mass hysteria can ignite.
In the classroom, a basic awareness of crowd psychology and group dynamics is a must if one is to get out of it with their sanity intact. The desire for harmony and conformity within any group facilitates social cohesion, which has led to optimal survival rates for homo sapiens since time immemorial. It’s also led to the ubiquitous rise of The Floss, The Dab, the fidget spinner, slime, stress balls, and poppers, to name but a few of the phenomena that have enchanted the hearts and minds and hands of the masses in recent years.
Isn’t it lovely when things catch on? Yes, and no is the simple answer to that.
For whilst the individual may understand that the purpose of a stress ball is to occupy the hands and free up mental energy to focus on the subject at hand, once the group gets a hold of this satisfying manipulable, it becomes a missile, a weapon, a big messy splodge on the carpet. What, then, turns a group of otherwise sentient and rational humans into a non-sentient, irrational mob?
First off, we need a group; a group here is defined in sociological terms as two or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular common objectives. This is also one of the most basic organisational structures of humankind, so thankfully, they abound.
Once formed, let the Group Dynamics ferment and bubble. These dynamics depend on attitudinal, behavioural and contextual characteristics, and will influence the structure and processes and overall functionality.
In the process, members derive a sense of identity and self-esteem, as well as fostering trust and (hopefully) positive interactions.
Yet even a cursory scroll through the annals of human history show that sometimes, the group goes bad. According to the Science Daily publication, researchers have found that “being in a group makes some people lose touch with their personal moral beliefs”.
Cases of mass hysteria have baffled and amused onlookers in equal parts since the dawn of time.
According to the book, “Epidemics of the Middle Ages”, by J. F. C. Hecker, a bunch of nuns began to miaow like cats, sometimes miaowing the face off each other for hours on end. Eventually, the neighbors called in the army to whip the cat miaows out of them.
In 1518, St. Vitus’ Dance saw over 400 people boogie down in the streets of Strasbourg following a bout of disease and famine. The danced ‘til their feet bled and they passed out, with some of them shuffling off this mortal coil from exhaustion.
The city brought in musicians and set up a stage to facilitate the movers and the shakers, but eventually, they banned all dancing and carted off those still busting the moves to the shrine of St. Vitus to be exorcised. A similar psychological illness befell Italians in the south of Italy in the 15th-17th centuries. Known as Tarantism, sufferers danced ‘til they dropped, literally. They also believed that it was caused by a tarantula bite, hence the name.
Salem, Massachusetts, saw the imprisonment of over 200 people, mostly women, and the death by hanging of 19 in 1692 when the town was gripped by an all-consuming terror of witchcraft. One recalcitrant farmer was also pressed to death beneath stones for refusing to give testimony.
In Tanzania (then Tanganyika) in 1962, three young girls began to laugh at a boarding school in Kashasha. Before long, 95 of the 159 students were LOLing, eventually causing the closure of the school three months later. However, the girls brought the laugher bug with them, with more than 1,000 people affected and 14 schools closing before the laughing pandemic came to an end.
These are but few of the cases of mass hysteria that were significant enough to be recorded. The flight of the starling pales in comparison, thankfully.
At times, however, the group may turn this fear and frustration outwards. Little good comes from people goaded to violence. And yet, “a group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into ‘mobs’ that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality”.
Concentration camps, Gulags, genocides and massacres provide tragic and irrefutable proof of this. And that’s in the 20th Century alone.
Healthy heaping’s of Groupthink tend to reduce the capacity for individual assertion of morals. William H. Whyte Jr. derived this term in 1952, “We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity – it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity – an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well”.
Almost two thirds of people will defer to the hive mind when instructed to do so by a figure of authority. The Milgram Experiment in 1974 had one participant electrically shock another for each wrong answer in a controlled setting. With each, the intensity of the shock increased, ‘til reaching a fatal 450-volt shock. 65 percent of participants administered the maximum level of shocks when instructed to do so, presumably “killing” the test subject in the other room. Thankfully, both the shocks and screams of agony were simulacra.
Still though….
Asche’s Conformity Experiment examined behaviour under the pressure of social forces. Participants were asked to look at one line on the left, and choose the line of corresponding length on the right. One line was clearly correct, the other two clearly not. 37 percent of the research subjects conformed with the group in choosing the incorrect line. Over the 12 critical trials, about 75 percent of participants conformed at least once. Only 25 percent never conformed. In a control group, less than 1 percent of the participants gave the wrong answer.
Do people act according to their disposition, personality, or because of the situation at hand? We like to think that we are impenetrable paragons of integrity.
An optimistic reading of the above experiments shows that whilst 65 percent of us would fry a fellow human when pressed to conform, another 35 percent would not, and one solid quarter of us would stand firm and call a spade a spade, despite social pressure to conform.
Our fragile sense of identity and self-esteem leaves us vulnerable to acts of foolishness at times, if not downright malice.
The starling got out of my room alive because one member of our group had the valor to march right on in there and open up the windows. Had we decided to wage war on the starlings for our own safety, who knows what kind of Lord of The Feathers type scenario might have evolved.
We must value and honour our diverse and disparate voices, now more than ever.
“We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly- that is the first law of nature.” Voltaire.
