November 29, 2011 • 38 mins
Humans rarely seem to agree, but when we do the results can be staggering. How does the phenomenon called protesting actually work? In this episode, Robert and Julie examine the world of protest and share a few tips for surviving your next rally.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
have you ever been to a protest? Have you ever
been part of the protest movement in any way, shape
or form. M I have been in the cities before
(00:24):
we're protests were going on, and I was sort of
clueless and walking through them. Oh yeah, Well, I think
we've all done that to a certain extent, Like when
I when my wife and I went to Thailand several
years back, there was some protesting going on at the time,
and we just we were on the edges off and
we we knew it was going going on, but that
was about the extent of it. Yeah, And it's kind
(00:46):
of it's it's difficult to when you're on vacation because
you're not in protest you mind frame, So you might say, oh,
I support that, but you know, you probably have things
to do, You've got you know, the love to see,
so on and so forth, and I make light of it,
but seriously, it's it's something that it So that has
been happening a lot lately, is definitely on our minds,
and we're recording this mid November, and as of mid November,
(01:08):
we've seen a lot of protests unfolding over the summer
in this fall. So yeah, like just the other day
they cleared out the Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, that's right,
So that's sort of up in the air as to
what the fate will be of Occupy Wall Street. Now.
Protests as a whole have have been around for ages,
like pretty much as as long as as human society
(01:29):
has been advanced enough to have laws and customs and
policies and cultural norms. Um, We've we've had reasons at
times to rebel against those norms. It's human instinct, right,
I mean you feel like some something has been uh,
there's some sort of un injustice going on in the
world that you need to write, right, and and we'll
(01:50):
talk about this a little bit more too, but it's
a little bit more complex. I mean obviously socio economic
issues come into play as well. Yeah. I tend to
think of it like a like a river. I think
that's the analogy made in How Protests Work, which article
which you can find on how stuff Works dot com. Uh,
thinking of it in terms of of a river. And
in the same way that yes, you can change the
course of a river, and nature can change the course
(02:13):
of a river, but it's gonna take something. It's gonna
take a certain amount of will, or a certain amount
of energy, a certain amount of power, because otherwise, rivers
tend to just keep going the way they're going unless
unless something comes along to change it. And that's the
way it tends to go with with something, well, whether
it is a law or a or a social norm
or some sort of an idea that has become popular
(02:34):
or or or has become the norm and a culture,
that the river will continue to go down the course
it's been going unless people rise up and change it,
unless they step forward and and like, you know what,
we're not gonna have the river run this way anymore.
We're going to alter its course in a less destructive
route or in a more wholesome route, etcetera. Yeah, it's
(02:55):
interesting you you use that analogy, because just yesterday on
NPR one of the Occupy Wall Street protesters was making
the analogy that they are like water, um that you know,
they're a morpheus in the sense that they just can
continue to sort of change course at will. So, yes,
they've been whisked away from Zuccati Park in New York City,
(03:15):
but that doesn't mean that the protest has stopped the
genies out of the bottle. And so they're just going
to continue to to I suppose, run downstream in whatever
manner they're like water. Um. So, in this podcast, we're
going to we're going to talk about protests more along
the lines how we approach it, like why do we protest,
(03:35):
and and also some of the misconceptions about protesting and
protesters and protesters. Uh, we're just gonna sort of jam
here about about what the protest is and how it works.
And then at the end, we're also going to run
through some some quick ideas, some quick suggestions that we've
run across that may help any of you out there
who who are planning to be a part of a
(03:56):
protest in the future, or just I mean, even if
you're not planning to be a part of one, Uh,
you may find yourself in the middle of one just
by virtue of traveling around or going about your daily life. Yeah,
and how you can better gauge a crowd and uh
be safe in the crowd really, Yeah, I mean whether
it's an occupy protest or a borderline revolution and in
(04:18):
another country or something as simple. You remember the great
coffee machine protests here at work of Oh yeah, I'm
not going to talk about the brand name of the
coffee that was taken away, but I will say this.
Everyone complained about that brand name coffee ceaselessly until it
was taken away and another subpar brand was brought in,
(04:40):
and I think everything just ground to a halt because
we live and breathe off of coffee here. Yeah. Well,
I remember I was one of the early protesters in
that particular movement. But no, but I was protesting before
anybody else, I think, really noticed the change. And so
then I was like, all right, I give up the
new this is the new order with coffee. I spring
my own coffee. And then everybody got up in arms
(05:02):
and she changed everything. So yeah, yeah, and the Twitter
feeds were just going nuts. They were. Luckily it didn't
turn violent, um, and we were only tear gast ones. Yeah,
it's just not too bad. Um. I mean, you know,
in a workplace, right. Yeah, But let's talk about one
of the original protesters, or at least in American history
(05:23):
that we think of Henry David Threau. Oh, yes, Henry
David Threau um in nineteenth century American philosopher, and his
big thing was civil disobedience. He was against slavery, which
was legal at the time. He was against the US
war with Mexico, and so he was like, you know what,
you know, things the way they are. If this was
(05:44):
a meal at a restaurant, I would refuse to pay
for it, So I'm going to refuse to pay for
it my taxes, taxes. He decided to just not gonna
pay his taxes, and and he was not injuring into
this situation thinking I'm going to stop paying my taxes.
Good luck funding that war without Henry David's dough behind it.
Now that that wasn't really his his approach, but he
(06:05):
was making a statement that that as individuals, we can
choose not to support the things that we disagree with, right,
We don't have to accept the status quo. Right. Yeah.
So of course they came and arrested him eventually, because
that's what happens when you don't pay your taxes, you
get put in the pokey. Yes, at least, but this
is really the birth of this idea of civil disobedience
UM is a way to combat perceived ills in the
(06:28):
world around you. Rosa Parks is another great example of
civil disobedience. UM. Of course she she is famous for
helping to uh begin the civil rights movement right with
the Alabama bus boycott. Yeah, this was ve and at
the time, Alabama state law required UM, black individuals to
set at the back of the bus and relinquish their
(06:50):
seat to white individuals if the vehicle was full. So
Rosa Parks decided, you know, I'm not going to comply
with this. I'm going to set where I want to
set and uh and this and again this is not
a situation. She was like, I'm going to change the
world with one movement, No, with with with one decision
to you know, to to disagree. But it ended up kickstarting.
This was like the snowball down the hill. Right. Eventually
(07:12):
you have a three d eighty one day boycott of
the Montgomery bus system. In the following year, the US
Supreme Court banded segregation on public transportation. Right. And this
wasn't as improvised as as it sounds. Because she was
a member of the Double A C p UM. There
was UM Joanne Robinson. She was a black woman and
a professor in all black Alabama State College, and she
(07:33):
thought it was time to to test the law. And
so Rosa Parks had completed a workshop on civil disobedience
before she was arrested, and she knew very well what
she was doing and what they were trying to accomplish. Yeah,
as as much as much as we may want to
sometimes interpret that story is it's a lady on the
bus and she finally just had too much and sat down. Um,
(07:53):
it wasn't quite that, but still, Uh, well, that's what
I love about that because I think that it shows
that there was this network going on, a lot of
fun being put into this, a lot of work being
put into this. And there's a great article called How
the Civil Rights Movement Work by John Fuller that goes
into this more detail if you're interested. Um, but this
is the time obviously that's pre Facebook, Twitter, email, So
(08:14):
it's really amazing that people were able to really get
all of these details down and execute very well planned situations.
And I mean we're talking about the situations that were
years in the planning. Yeah. And of course, the other
big name in protests, non violent protest is Mahatma Gandhi
who in the eighteen and nineties, early eighteen Nini, who
(08:36):
worked as a legal advisor to an Indian law from
in South Africa. So he's he's you know, he starts
off not like the Mohamma Gandhi we come to identify
with and the iconic Gandhi that we we know. But
while there he encountered rachel intolerance. He in sain he
was reading the works of Thorow tolstoy Um, even the
(08:56):
writings of Jesus uh and uh well, the writings of Jesus,
the tales of us, you know, and he ends up
he ends up campaigning for the rights of Indians in
South Africa and then returns back home to India itself
and rallies of support against British colonial rule and the
cast system. So he ends up coming up with a
strategy called Satya Graja, which is Sanskrit for truth and firmness.
(09:22):
And this in itself to is based in in even
older ideas that the date back to the Vedic panishards
of non violence against any living thing. Uh that that
his whole ideas, it was, you know, we're going to
protest and we're just going to we're gonna keep it
as non violent as possible, and uh, it kind of
it kind of bleeds over into some of the stuff
(09:42):
we talked about in Martyrs, the idea that if you
if you sit there and take it, eventually it shames
the person dishing it out. And that's exactly what it did,
and very similar to um, you know some of the
things that happens. Civil rights movement people were absolutely aghast
at how the government um or certain officials initially reacted
and that put the pressure on those governments to make
(10:05):
huge sweeping changes. Yeah, there was a nineteen nineteen the
British troops open fire and demonstrators and then there's this
enormous massacre, uh and estimated three hundred seventy nine killed,
over a thousand injured, and Gandhi ends up calling for
non compliance. Indian public officials resigned from the British government,
parents withdrew their children from British schools, and virtually anything
(10:26):
bearing the Royal seal was boycotted. So in India's struggle
for independence ends up paying off like through this this
measure and things things that could not have been one
necessarily with violence or or violence have been used, you
would have seen an entirely different unfolding of events and
unfolding of the modern India. Yeah, the Satia Graja, I
(10:47):
think was obviously key to this, right because it just said,
you have to roomain passive, even if you're being kicked,
even if you're being beaten. We must refuse to act.
And of course this is this is the the the
upper hand that Gandhi and the protesters had eventually using
this tactic. But of course, sometimes protests do turn violent,
(11:07):
and I mean you can pretty much search for the
phrase protest turns violent on Google News any day and
you'll find a pretty recent example. I mean, it happens.
You get people in a in an area, everyone's kind
of riled up, their tensions mounting. There's generally some sort
of security police or military force keeping an eye on things. Uh,
it's kind of a powder keg And I mean that's
(11:28):
one of the things that Gandhi realized in his whole thing,
was don't don't give them cause to set the powder
keg off. And if they start setting the powder keg off,
don't throw more powder on the fire. Right, And it
doesn't it's not even just a protest, It could be
a bunch of individuals congregating. Um. And I'm thinking about
Laura Logan. She was the chief foreign news correspondent for CBS. Uh.
(11:51):
You know during the Egyptian Revolution in Tahier Square, she
was brutally desaulted, assaulted, sexual assaulted. And again, this is
a crowd that was initially coming together to celebrate and
turned very violent. Um. So we'll talk a little bit
more about that and how how and if you can
actually read a crowd and try to avoid that. So
what do we protest, Why do we do it? What's
(12:12):
at the heart of it? Well, you can't really talk
about about protests about talking about group think a little
bit and the whole the idea of like the wisdom
of the crowds or well, there's sort of two sides
to the coin. On one hand, there's the idea of
the wisdom of the crowd. You get you get a
you go out in the street, you ask what the
opinion is, and then the street is going to be right. Well,
this is that idea of emergence. Right, And we've discussed
(12:32):
this a little in the past, that if left to
its own devices and within certain constraints, the crowd will
do a better job at figuring things out than a
single person. A really cool example of this this came
up in an article I was writing for for How
Stuff Works about the game Pandemic. This is a game
where people collaborate to try and stop an outbreak on
(12:55):
a game board that looks like a map. And I
was reading some interviews with the Dinner and he and
this is the guy who created the guy who sat
down and wrote out this game, planned it out. And
he pointed out that when he if he plays the
game by himself, like controlling all say four players, And again,
this is a game where part of it is people
have to get along and collaborate and potentially fight with
(13:16):
each other about what are the best moves to initiate.
There's no leader per se, not an officially prescribed leader,
so they have to kind of figure it out and
decide what their group tactic is going to be, or
or they're or if they're just going to fight about things.
But even even with this situation in place, he pointed
out that when he was playing a game controlling all
(13:36):
four players, he generally did not do as good as
four individual players because you're gonna have Each of these
individuals is gonna bring like new uh us new data,
and if if they can work those out, they're going
to actually do better than the guy who created the game.
Well see, and that's that's one of the things that
uh I guess you could say one of the errors
(13:57):
that people make when they talk about protests sometimes and
then video they say that the crowd is irrational or
full of irrational people. And what you're saying is is
that there's you know, pointing to this sort of crowd
intelligence that is happening, and that people aren't actually nuts,
they're not being crazy. A lot of people who are
involved in this crowd are actually pretty pragmatic people. Right. Well,
(14:18):
I think everyone has a rightful fear of mobs, I mean,
and I think that's what plays into this. So so
there's the idea that we know that a mob is
a fearful thing when a when a crowd of people
are out of control and and there's porks with pitchforks
or fire or you know or whatever Frankenstein, right and
Frankenstein in the movie and uh but but no, like
(14:41):
a riot situation is not a good environment, and it
is one that is rightfully feared by by many. So
it's easy to extrapolate that and say, I mean it
ties back into the basic evolution. You know, are you
going to make a type one air or type two air? Right?
And so you look at a large group of people
and you're like, I don't like to look at this.
This is gonna they're out of control. Just look at
the beard on that one guy, you know, like these
(15:03):
dirty bumps. Speaking of this is this is another common
claim that people make that the crowd is poor, right right, yeah,
the it's going to be the masses teaming out there
to tear down the golden palaces of the of the rulers,
right yeah. And this is from an article from Psychology
Today that's actually talking about the reasons why we protests,
and it says people join mass protests to achieve personal
(15:25):
goals that they are otherwise unable to realize, for example,
getting jobs, affordable housing, or getting rid of their debts.
But what counts in terms of people's motivations to protest
is not so much their absolute poverty level, but their
relative poverty that is compared to their peers. Sociologists have
called this a relative deprivation and it is important predictor
of social unrest. So the point is there is that
(15:47):
you might have someone who's protesting at say occupied Wall Street,
who's doing fine. Actually they can put some you know,
fine being meaning they can eat, they have clothes, they
have a place to live. So the point of it, though,
is that the person that occupy Wall Street is saying, Okay, yes,
I know that I'm doing better than this other person,
this this other country. But the fact of the matter
(16:09):
is I live here in this city with these people,
and I should have the same access to opportunities and
resources that this person next to me does, that my
politician does, um, that the blue collar worker does, the
white collar worker does. And it's it's really important that
while we tend to think of the US is a
rich country, the fact of the matter is that the
(16:29):
income gap between the rich and poor is much greater
than anywhere else in the Western world. Um. So statistical
data bears out that the more unequal society is, the
more stressed and unhappy people are, and the more chance
again we have of social unrest. Now, two other ideas
that are I think are pretty closely related that are
brought up in the Psychology Today article one crowd members
(16:50):
are all alike, and that the crowd has no face.
Now the crowd members are all alike. This one is
is one that I think tends to it. It tends
to get be wound up in media coverage, like, for instance,
in in noticing various media outlets covering Occupy Wall Street. Granted,
you only have so many photos to choose from, I'm sure,
(17:12):
I mean, I'm sure a p getty all these places
rolling out a lot of photos, but you tend to
see people gravitating towards particular images, and like, there's just
one of this dude that kind of looks like Andy
and Parks and wreck Um with kind of like one
of these beards I think, I know, yeah, yeah he
and he has like one of these beards, except his
his mustaches shave, so it's kind of looks like giant
wolverine ciders and he's like kind of yelling, and so
(17:34):
you see that picture enough and you're kind of like,
that's the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's kind of burly
dudes with the crazy sideburns, yelling that haven't maybe they
haven't had a bath recently. Well, this is another thing
that that comes up to This came up in the
London riots as well, like how could so many people
from so many different backgrounds, since you know, of all
stripes of life, how could they all be together doing this?
(17:57):
This is impossible, you know because not right next to
Andy from parts of reck, you also have a guy
in a business suit. Um. So it's funny because we've
talked about this before. We like pattern recognition and we
like to keep it simple and easy. But the fact
of the matter is is that all these people are
coming together for a common cause. Um, it's not weird
that there are people from all different walks of life
(18:20):
getting together and protesting right now. But the idea that
the crowd has no face, that's another thing that came up.
You know, this is frequently cited, well, the like the
occupied movement has no leader, you know, so they can't
just shut down this leader or arrest this leader because
the movement is greater. That's true to sort of varying
degrees with with movements, because even in something like Occupy
(18:40):
Wall Street, during these occupied movements, you're going to have
people that are more connected. You're gonna have I mean,
just on a basic level, think of your own friend group. Um,
there are people that are better organizers than others. I
mean just like within you know, my own marriage, my
wife is much better organizer than me. So well, just
even in the personality tests that we all took here
and how stuff works, and some of us were put
(19:02):
in a group and made play with legos, which was
perfectly fine. Us and another group were made to play
with legos unbeknownst to us, and then a third group
had to clean all the floors. That was really weird.
They like doing that. That's what their personality test said. Um,
but you saw one group I'm gonna says, we were
all grouped in like UM dispositions. So in my group
(19:26):
where the creative crazies, and so we made some sort
of toy that made no sense and was inoperable. The
other group made this was amazing to watch. The other
group made this completely streamlined, UM, some sort of vehicle
like with little people, and it was of course it
was in running condition. So yes, you do have people
who are you know, automatically going to start organizing and
(19:49):
helping UM in a protest group situation. And then this
is another one that I found. It the idea that
protests correlate to weather, and this one turns out to
be true, or at least there's some there's some strong
evidence to support the idea. Yeah, there's a Columbia University
study and they used data from nineteen fifties two thousand four,
and the researchers concluded that the likelihood of new conflicts
(20:09):
arising in affected countries, mostly mostly located in the tropics
double during alminio years is compared with wetter, cooler years. Right,
so the hot, dry weather was driving people nuts, raising
their hackles. The the the theory goes right, and uh,
this they say, we believe this finding represents the first
(20:30):
major evidence that global climate is a major factor in
organized violence around the world. This was said by Solomon
his Young, the leader, the lead author of the study,
who conducted all the research at Columba University. And then
another thing too, the Psychology Today article. I can't remember
if it actually went into this, but you know, the
recent upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa really
(20:51):
can be traced to the region's youth, because we're talking
about millions of young people facing widespread unemployment and seeing
an earth of opportunities ahead of them. So you know,
again we're seeing a lot of these sort of themes
coming up, opportunities lack of them. You know, you look
at Occupy Wall Street and you know, some people have
sort of made light of that because there's some there's
some yoga going on, there's some hacky sack playing. Um. Again,
(21:15):
some of the people that are in that group, Um,
you might point to and say, but you've got it,
You've got it. Fine, Well I think we should we
should see more yoga practice. Actually we should. It's a
really good idea on both sides. Yeah. Um, but again,
there is this this sense that that there is injustice
going on that needs to be right it. All right, Well,
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
(21:35):
we're going to discuss crowd psychology a little more and
get into what you can do to protect yourself when
you encounter a protests with This podcast is brought to
you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel.
At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark which drives innovation.
(21:56):
Join us at curiosity dot com and explore the answers
to life's questions. All right, we're back crowd psychology the
group think in action. UM. We mentioned a little earlier
the idea that four people playing a game are going
to do better than one person playing a game. That
(22:16):
if you that the street is wiser than the individual,
and that and that if you were to pull a
number of individuals in a group about a particular topic, UM,
on average, they would get it right. This is the
classic like, I guess how many jelly beans are are
in that bottle? Right? But if you want to kill
this jelly being phenomenon, the one thing that will do
(22:38):
it really well, aside from I guess like putting a
hall of cylinder in the middle of the jelly beans
or something, would be uh to aggregate the information when
the When the information is aggregated amongst the people being pulled,
drastic fall off and crowd wisdoms. So is that when
people become informed of others decisions? Yeah, or I think, um,
it's it's like, for instance, when you can if you
(23:00):
all everybody and you ask him a question such as, um,
do you think the President of the United States as
a US citizen? And then but but then if you
expose them to poll data shows that a large number
of people are in question about it or or say
global warming is another one where if you're exposed people
to enough polls and enough data that represents the idea
(23:20):
that hey, lots of people think this is uh, this
is bunk, then people's uh wisdom on the data on
the matter will be affected. Well see. And I think
that's really important when you're talking about crowd psychology, right,
because yes, there there's a self organizing aspect to it, um.
But when you are sharing data and you know you
do hear everybody else's opinions, I mean, that's when you
(23:41):
can start to go a bit awry and logic. So, yes,
they're they're the crowd. The most part is rational, but
we've seen it turned irrationally, especially if it if it
is being controlled and people are being told what to
what to think. I mean, one thing to keep in
mind with protests. As much as we we like to
discuss the really good examples of protests, UM, one of
(24:01):
the most successful protests in the twentieth century was, in
some respects the Nazi Party. I remember the rise of
the Nazi Party in Germany. H A lot of that
began as protests, and then the protests were successful enough
that they ended up becoming the government. So yeah, that's
interesting to think of it that way and how that
(24:22):
that error in logic rose to to really just yeah,
and for every great example of civil rights protests out there,
you can find another equally disturbing um say, klan klu
klux klan group thing going on as well. So that's
just something to keep in mind about the free market
of ideas and the use of protests to try and
(24:43):
turn the tide of public sentiment. This is interesting too.
This is from psychologist Clifford Stock at the University of
Liverpool in England. He has a theory of crowd behavior
called the elaborated social identity model. This holds that individuals
and crowd do keep thinking for themselves, um on top
but their individual identities, though they also develop a makeshift
social identity which includes everyone else in the group. When
(25:06):
the group faces oppositions such as police indiscriminately bashing it's
the members of the group with batons. The social identity
congeals members of the group began to work together to
fight with it sees as common oppressors. So that's that
maybe some sort of insight, uh, particularly into the Nazi
example that you're talking about that if someone, if the
(25:28):
group feels on some level that there in danger, then
all of a sudden, your your individualism will seed to
group think. Yeah, which explains a lot of why a
protest can be successful and also why it can potentially
collapse into violence. Okay, let's say it all goes to poo.
What do we do? Well? Um, it depends exactly how
(25:50):
it goes to poo. Actually, UM, I'll tell you one
thing to keep in mind. We reference this earlier when
we brought up the idea of our bosses tear gassing
us tear gas. I just wrote an article about this
for Housta Works, How tear gas Works, which should be
on the site by the time this episode airs. And uh,
there are a number of things to do if you
get tear gas. First of all, tear gas is it's
(26:10):
commonly used as actually cs gas, and it is generally
not lethal. It is less lethal if you want to
get technical, though. It is also technically a chemical weapon,
and it's used just around the world no matter what
country you're talking about, because it is an effective riot
control agent. And the reason is because if you were
hit with tear gas, you pretty much are only concerned
with the horrendous burning in your eyes, in your mouth,
(26:33):
possibly in your lungs, and on your skin. It really
tends to simplify a situation what starts off as you know,
I believe that people of my generation don't have a
proper say and government blah blah blah. It ends up
devolving into, oh, my goodness, I need to get some
water on my face now. And so people tend to scatter,
and certainly, if you were tear gas, scattering is a
good idea provided you can see where you're going and
(26:56):
there's not a danger in running, because you want to
get away from the source of the tear gas. And
then you're gonna want to if you have if you
have contacts in you're gonna want to get those out,
preferably with hands that have not been and so clean
hands beings like you know, if you can find somebody
who can jab them out of your eyes for you,
or or preferably medical relief. A lot of protests, you're
(27:20):
gonna have some people on hand to provide medical support
afterwards for individuals who have who have been pure gas.
So ideally, like you would have safety goggles on, you
would have some sort of surgical gloves on, you might
look odd. But you also see individuals attending protest with
gas mass with be they you know, commercially available gas
mask or improvised gas masks. I'm not saying do that,
(27:42):
but some people. If you don't have it, you know,
try a scarf. That's not as effective. But obviously there
are things that you can do to prepare if you
if you think that you will be in the middle
of a protest. Yeah, the big thing with tear gas
is you want to get away from it. You want
to get it off of you, and then you'll probably
be okay. Prolonged exposure that's where things get dangerous. And
this is kind of a observation, but it probably bears
(28:04):
mentioning that if you don't want to get hit with
tear gas, if you don't want uh the police to
uh maybe aggravate you a bit, do not be in
the front lines. Try to be on the periphery of
the crowd. Um. Of course, that would make a really
crappy protest if everybody did that, but if this is
what you're trying to avoid, then it makes sense that
(28:26):
you would back off a little bit. Yeah. Oh and
then the other thing too, if you get it on
your clothing, you're gonna take that. Take those clothing items
off as soon as possible. You're gonna want to shower.
And if you have it on your your shirt, you
might want to consider cutting the shirt off if it
has to be removed over your head, because otherwise you're
going to be dragging a tear gas coat shirt across
your face. So just another small thing to worry about there.
(28:49):
But then also it's worth knowing that some individuals are
are going to be hyper sensitive to tear gas, and
that's certainly a situation to be aware of. But then
also some people have a surprising immunity to to your gas. Right,
so there's no way to know unless you have been gassed, really,
but you know, well, I mean you can know if
you have a heightened the immunity. You mean, you may
have like a compromised immune system. If you were a child,
(29:10):
if you weren't an elderly individual, then that's a pretty
good sign that to your gas is going to have
a rougher effect on you. Yeah, let's talk about policing too,
because obviously the police are there, they're not trying to
be the bad guys. Sometimes things happen and they inadvertently
end up being the bad guys. They didn't set out
to be the bad guys. That's a very difficult position
for someone to be in, stressful, it's potentially dangerous for
(29:31):
them and for you. So, you know, how do you
behave if if you are confronted by a police officer, Well,
a lot of it. I mean it lines up basically
what Gandhi was saying, right, I mean, if if some
if some dude is is clubbing people in front of you,
or I mean not even clubbing, if they're just say, right,
you know, resting everybody inside. If you were passive, if
you are visibly not a threat, then you're you're going
(29:56):
to be better off. You're less likely to to probably
be beat with a a baton or um, to be
put in a position of aggression by a police officer.
That of course, we have seen examples before where that's
not necessarily true. But if this is something that you're
doing again, you've got to keep that in mind. Um,
And what do you do if a police officer or
someone else in the crowd becomes very aggressive with you?
(30:19):
I mean, there are actually a couple of things that
you can think about doing. It takes foresight and it
takes all a lot of concentration, but you can help
to diffuse a situation. Well, um, one of the this
comes from the book How to Want to Fight that
we're looking at and then certainly we're not we're certainly
not advocating getting in a fight with anybody. You're not
advocating this this book, per se. We're just there's some
(30:40):
information in it that was helpful. Yeah, And one of
one of these was that if you were in a
situation where where someone is acting aggressively towards you, and
in a protest environment, this could be even one of
your fellow protesters, that things get out of hand. Um,
they say, if you were to say something confusing or
perplexing that that is, that is out of character with
the situation, that can help if only providing like one
(31:04):
brief moment to slip away or to or to distill
the aggression of the other. End. Right, So if someone
were about it seemed like someone was about to attack you,
then you could calmly say to them something like do
you know what time it is? Which sounds ridiculous, but
really what's happening is that it's creating this this mental
sort of flicker in their brains, and it's cognitive dissonance, right,
(31:26):
because they're like what, who cares what? Because they would
expect someone to say, like occupy this or back off pig, right.
I mean that's the kind of that's kind of the
kind of stuff that that someone in an aggressive mindset
in that situation might expect them to say. And if
you don't play along with that, with that transcript, right,
with a social role that you're playing right right, then
(31:46):
that that can potentially help diffuse the situation. Yeah. And
another effective thing to do is to calmly, again, calmly
say something along the lines of, you know, there are
a lot of surveillance cameras around here, or there are
a lot of people with video surveillance UM or you know,
cell phone video, so that you can get that person
to back out of their heads a little bit and
(32:07):
and sort of see the big picture of the situation
and maybe even think, okay, this is you know, someone's
about to record, um, some sort of transgression on my part. Yeah.
And if you manage to make it away from a
protest that has fallen apart into some sort of violent situation,
take it an indirect route home, don't don't go the
(32:28):
direct route necessarily. Yeah, I read that, and I wondered
about that. Um, is this I wondered if this was
a sort of extension of police going after people. Um,
although I'm assuming that if you're on your way home,
you're probably out of nabbing distance, I think that. Yeah,
I think this one just basically it's kind of like
you're being herded into arrest kind of a situation. It's about,
(32:50):
you know, arrest avoidance. And that's the other thing. If
someone is trying to arrest you at a protest, you
should probably just comply and be arrested. Really, I mean,
I mean, certainly we're not to advocate that anyone try
to avoid arrest lawful arrest, but I mean, if it's
a situation between being chased down or hit with the
rupper bullet versus giving yourself up to the authorities that
(33:11):
are cracking down in the protests, you know, and if
you're about to get caught to this is sort of interesting. Again,
it's from from the book, but they were basically saying
that it sounds querintuitive, but if you're about to get struck,
you should try to relax your muscles. Yeah. The reason
is because your reaction time is going to be a
lot slower if you lock up all your muscles in
(33:31):
anticipation of a blow. So if you're going to try
to avoid it, then that's what you'd want to do.
I mean, it's very kind of kung fu, right, because
you know it looks like a batter on the mound, right.
If the batter is stressed out, they're not going to
have as they may be as powerful as all get out,
but they're not gonna have as much control over this swing. Yeah.
And and this is this is kind of funny. From
the book, they said when a drillin hits your system,
(33:51):
you become tougher and more resilient. But the downside is
that you become a one task, knuckle dragging troglodyte. So
the more stressed you are, the more your body shuts down.
And we're talking from fine motor skills like finger dexterity
and I hand coordination to the loss of depth perception
and then of course irrational thinking. So there's just some
ideas about how you might respond to a protest environment. Yeah,
(34:16):
and and this again, this is sort of timely. This
piece of information to um in the final hours of
protest um. But you know, when the permits are about
to expire, this is usually when the police make most
of their arrests because now they can kind of charge
in and do that. So so go early and leave
(34:36):
while they're wanting you to stay right exactly like basically,
like with any party, leave on a high note. So
let's leave on a high note on this one then, UM.
And though certainly we invite any ideas and opinions related
to this topic, because because this is more than than
than a lot of them, there's some aspects of it
that are that are open to interpretation in terms of
like what, for instance, what the best response is. I
(34:59):
mean these right, Yeah, I would love to hear from
people who have perhaps been in many protests before, what
have your experiences been like? And then what has it
been like when people like try to keep it cool
and try to you know, try to engage in non
violence and uh and and passive responses to all of
this be honesty to hear a new tails. I'd love
to leave off with a quote from Martin Luther King
(35:21):
about his take on the psychology of the disenfranchised. There
is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with
a large segment of people in that society who feel
that they have no stake in it, who feel that
they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake
in their society protect that society, but when they don't
have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it. That's a
pretty stage. Words from Martin Luther King. Well, hey, I'm
(35:44):
gonna reach into the listener mail folder if the robot
will hand it to me. Thank you, robot. So this
one here is from Hannah Hannah wrightesin and says, Dear
Robert and Julie, I recently listened to your podcast on
sports and was intrigued by a passing bit event from Nation.
When you were talking about the brain simulating throwing a
baseball when watching baseball being baseball being thrown, Robert mentioned
(36:07):
the brain doing the same while reading. As the family's
resident bookworm, it has been pointed out to me that
while reading, I make a lot of facial expressions. My
parents and sister tease me for this, but I have
found that these expressions are not of my reaction to
the book, but reflect the emotions of the characters. For example,
of a character's browse for a mine will be as well.
I always attributed this to general quirkiness, but it was
(36:29):
fascinating to hear that, hear what might be going on
in my head. I love the podcast You guys make
College Apps season a lot less stressful, Oh college application, Susan. Yeah,
as opposed to like something on your phone? Yeah yeah,
um yeah, that's that's interesting. I mean her her mirror
neurons were definitely at work there. And I was just
thinking too about the Imaginary Friends podcast that we did
(36:52):
and which we talked about the authors sometimes engaging with
the characters are creating as imaginary friends, in fact thinking
of them as imaginary friend and so a lot of
that plays into it, the empathy part um. I have
one quick email from a listener named Savar, and Savar said,
I just heard your last podcast and heard Julie say
that adrenaline fledgs your body. I'm a biology student. I
(37:14):
just recently found out that the amount of adrenaline needed
to trigger the fight or flight response is actually minuscule.
Adrenaline has roughly the same concentration in your body as
an aspirin tablet dissolved an Olympic sized swimming pool. Okay,
so that was kind of that's pretty fascinating, right, like
that that that amount could make you feel as that
you were having adrenaline rush, like you as if you
(37:36):
were being flooded with adrenaline that you're not, so thank you, savar. Alright, Well,
if you guys have any tidbits to share with us, uh,
you know, especially about protests, your own experiences with them,
your own thoughts about them, uh, and about I mean
just the the idea of protests is this social thing.
I mean, that's what fascinates me the most, um and
certainly just what engaged me the most, and writing that
(37:57):
article about protests. Share them with We are on Facebook
and Twitter, We're blow the Mind on both of those
and you can always share your thoughts by sending us
an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as
(38:19):
we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
have you ever been to a protest? Have you ever
been part of the protest movement in any way, shape
or form. M I have been in the cities before
(00:24):
we're protests were going on, and I was sort of
clueless and walking through them. Oh yeah, Well, I think
we've all done that to a certain extent, Like when
I when my wife and I went to Thailand several
years back, there was some protesting going on at the time,
and we just we were on the edges off and
we we knew it was going going on, but that
was about the extent of it. Yeah, And it's kind
(00:46):
of it's it's difficult to when you're on vacation because
you're not in protest you mind frame, So you might say, oh,
I support that, but you know, you probably have things
to do, You've got you know, the love to see,
so on and so forth, and I make light of it,
but seriously, it's it's something that it So that has
been happening a lot lately, is definitely on our minds,
and we're recording this mid November, and as of mid November,
(01:08):
we've seen a lot of protests unfolding over the summer
in this fall. So yeah, like just the other day
they cleared out the Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, that's right,
So that's sort of up in the air as to
what the fate will be of Occupy Wall Street. Now.
Protests as a whole have have been around for ages,
like pretty much as as long as as human society
(01:29):
has been advanced enough to have laws and customs and
policies and cultural norms. Um, We've we've had reasons at
times to rebel against those norms. It's human instinct, right,
I mean you feel like some something has been uh,
there's some sort of un injustice going on in the
world that you need to write, right, and and we'll
(01:50):
talk about this a little bit more too, but it's
a little bit more complex. I mean obviously socio economic
issues come into play as well. Yeah. I tend to
think of it like a like a river. I think
that's the analogy made in How Protests Work, which article
which you can find on how stuff Works dot com. Uh,
thinking of it in terms of of a river. And
in the same way that yes, you can change the
course of a river, and nature can change the course
(02:13):
of a river, but it's gonna take something. It's gonna
take a certain amount of will, or a certain amount
of energy, a certain amount of power, because otherwise, rivers
tend to just keep going the way they're going unless
unless something comes along to change it. And that's the
way it tends to go with with something, well, whether
it is a law or a or a social norm
or some sort of an idea that has become popular
(02:34):
or or or has become the norm and a culture,
that the river will continue to go down the course
it's been going unless people rise up and change it,
unless they step forward and and like, you know what,
we're not gonna have the river run this way anymore.
We're going to alter its course in a less destructive
route or in a more wholesome route, etcetera. Yeah, it's
(02:55):
interesting you you use that analogy, because just yesterday on
NPR one of the Occupy Wall Street protesters was making
the analogy that they are like water, um that you know,
they're a morpheus in the sense that they just can
continue to sort of change course at will. So, yes,
they've been whisked away from Zuccati Park in New York City,
(03:15):
but that doesn't mean that the protest has stopped the
genies out of the bottle. And so they're just going
to continue to to I suppose, run downstream in whatever
manner they're like water. Um. So, in this podcast, we're
going to we're going to talk about protests more along
the lines how we approach it, like why do we protest,
(03:35):
and and also some of the misconceptions about protesting and
protesters and protesters. Uh, we're just gonna sort of jam
here about about what the protest is and how it works.
And then at the end, we're also going to run
through some some quick ideas, some quick suggestions that we've
run across that may help any of you out there
who who are planning to be a part of a
(03:56):
protest in the future, or just I mean, even if
you're not planning to be a part of one, Uh,
you may find yourself in the middle of one just
by virtue of traveling around or going about your daily life. Yeah,
and how you can better gauge a crowd and uh
be safe in the crowd really, Yeah, I mean whether
it's an occupy protest or a borderline revolution and in
(04:18):
another country or something as simple. You remember the great
coffee machine protests here at work of Oh yeah, I'm
not going to talk about the brand name of the
coffee that was taken away, but I will say this.
Everyone complained about that brand name coffee ceaselessly until it
was taken away and another subpar brand was brought in,
(04:40):
and I think everything just ground to a halt because
we live and breathe off of coffee here. Yeah. Well,
I remember I was one of the early protesters in
that particular movement. But no, but I was protesting before
anybody else, I think, really noticed the change. And so
then I was like, all right, I give up the
new this is the new order with coffee. I spring
my own coffee. And then everybody got up in arms
(05:02):
and she changed everything. So yeah, yeah, and the Twitter
feeds were just going nuts. They were. Luckily it didn't
turn violent, um, and we were only tear gast ones. Yeah,
it's just not too bad. Um. I mean, you know,
in a workplace, right. Yeah, But let's talk about one
of the original protesters, or at least in American history
(05:23):
that we think of Henry David Threau. Oh, yes, Henry
David Threau um in nineteenth century American philosopher, and his
big thing was civil disobedience. He was against slavery, which
was legal at the time. He was against the US
war with Mexico, and so he was like, you know what,
you know, things the way they are. If this was
(05:44):
a meal at a restaurant, I would refuse to pay
for it, So I'm going to refuse to pay for
it my taxes, taxes. He decided to just not gonna
pay his taxes, and and he was not injuring into
this situation thinking I'm going to stop paying my taxes.
Good luck funding that war without Henry David's dough behind it.
Now that that wasn't really his his approach, but he
(06:05):
was making a statement that that as individuals, we can
choose not to support the things that we disagree with, right,
We don't have to accept the status quo. Right. Yeah.
So of course they came and arrested him eventually, because
that's what happens when you don't pay your taxes, you
get put in the pokey. Yes, at least, but this
is really the birth of this idea of civil disobedience
UM is a way to combat perceived ills in the
(06:28):
world around you. Rosa Parks is another great example of
civil disobedience. UM. Of course she she is famous for
helping to uh begin the civil rights movement right with
the Alabama bus boycott. Yeah, this was ve and at
the time, Alabama state law required UM, black individuals to
set at the back of the bus and relinquish their
(06:50):
seat to white individuals if the vehicle was full. So
Rosa Parks decided, you know, I'm not going to comply
with this. I'm going to set where I want to
set and uh and this and again this is not
a situation. She was like, I'm going to change the
world with one movement, No, with with with one decision
to you know, to to disagree. But it ended up kickstarting.
This was like the snowball down the hill. Right. Eventually
(07:12):
you have a three d eighty one day boycott of
the Montgomery bus system. In the following year, the US
Supreme Court banded segregation on public transportation. Right. And this
wasn't as improvised as as it sounds. Because she was
a member of the Double A C p UM. There
was UM Joanne Robinson. She was a black woman and
a professor in all black Alabama State College, and she
(07:33):
thought it was time to to test the law. And
so Rosa Parks had completed a workshop on civil disobedience
before she was arrested, and she knew very well what
she was doing and what they were trying to accomplish. Yeah,
as as much as much as we may want to
sometimes interpret that story is it's a lady on the
bus and she finally just had too much and sat down. Um,
(07:53):
it wasn't quite that, but still, Uh, well, that's what
I love about that because I think that it shows
that there was this network going on, a lot of
fun being put into this, a lot of work being
put into this. And there's a great article called How
the Civil Rights Movement Work by John Fuller that goes
into this more detail if you're interested. Um, but this
is the time obviously that's pre Facebook, Twitter, email, So
(08:14):
it's really amazing that people were able to really get
all of these details down and execute very well planned situations.
And I mean we're talking about the situations that were
years in the planning. Yeah. And of course, the other
big name in protests, non violent protest is Mahatma Gandhi
who in the eighteen and nineties, early eighteen Nini, who
(08:36):
worked as a legal advisor to an Indian law from
in South Africa. So he's he's you know, he starts
off not like the Mohamma Gandhi we come to identify
with and the iconic Gandhi that we we know. But
while there he encountered rachel intolerance. He in sain he
was reading the works of Thorow tolstoy Um, even the
(08:56):
writings of Jesus uh and uh well, the writings of Jesus,
the tales of us, you know, and he ends up
he ends up campaigning for the rights of Indians in
South Africa and then returns back home to India itself
and rallies of support against British colonial rule and the
cast system. So he ends up coming up with a
strategy called Satya Graja, which is Sanskrit for truth and firmness.
(09:22):
And this in itself to is based in in even
older ideas that the date back to the Vedic panishards
of non violence against any living thing. Uh that that
his whole ideas, it was, you know, we're going to
protest and we're just going to we're gonna keep it
as non violent as possible, and uh, it kind of
it kind of bleeds over into some of the stuff
(09:42):
we talked about in Martyrs, the idea that if you
if you sit there and take it, eventually it shames
the person dishing it out. And that's exactly what it did,
and very similar to um, you know some of the
things that happens. Civil rights movement people were absolutely aghast
at how the government um or certain officials initially reacted
and that put the pressure on those governments to make
(10:05):
huge sweeping changes. Yeah, there was a nineteen nineteen the
British troops open fire and demonstrators and then there's this
enormous massacre, uh and estimated three hundred seventy nine killed,
over a thousand injured, and Gandhi ends up calling for
non compliance. Indian public officials resigned from the British government,
parents withdrew their children from British schools, and virtually anything
(10:26):
bearing the Royal seal was boycotted. So in India's struggle
for independence ends up paying off like through this this
measure and things things that could not have been one
necessarily with violence or or violence have been used, you
would have seen an entirely different unfolding of events and
unfolding of the modern India. Yeah, the Satia Graja, I
(10:47):
think was obviously key to this, right because it just said,
you have to roomain passive, even if you're being kicked,
even if you're being beaten. We must refuse to act.
And of course this is this is the the the
upper hand that Gandhi and the protesters had eventually using
this tactic. But of course, sometimes protests do turn violent,
(11:07):
and I mean you can pretty much search for the
phrase protest turns violent on Google News any day and
you'll find a pretty recent example. I mean, it happens.
You get people in a in an area, everyone's kind
of riled up, their tensions mounting. There's generally some sort
of security police or military force keeping an eye on things. Uh,
it's kind of a powder keg And I mean that's
(11:28):
one of the things that Gandhi realized in his whole thing,
was don't don't give them cause to set the powder
keg off. And if they start setting the powder keg off,
don't throw more powder on the fire. Right, And it
doesn't it's not even just a protest, It could be
a bunch of individuals congregating. Um. And I'm thinking about
Laura Logan. She was the chief foreign news correspondent for CBS. Uh.
(11:51):
You know during the Egyptian Revolution in Tahier Square, she
was brutally desaulted, assaulted, sexual assaulted. And again, this is
a crowd that was initially coming together to celebrate and
turned very violent. Um. So we'll talk a little bit
more about that and how how and if you can
actually read a crowd and try to avoid that. So
what do we protest, Why do we do it? What's
(12:12):
at the heart of it? Well, you can't really talk
about about protests about talking about group think a little
bit and the whole the idea of like the wisdom
of the crowds or well, there's sort of two sides
to the coin. On one hand, there's the idea of
the wisdom of the crowd. You get you get a
you go out in the street, you ask what the
opinion is, and then the street is going to be right. Well,
this is that idea of emergence. Right, And we've discussed
(12:32):
this a little in the past, that if left to
its own devices and within certain constraints, the crowd will
do a better job at figuring things out than a
single person. A really cool example of this this came
up in an article I was writing for for How
Stuff Works about the game Pandemic. This is a game
where people collaborate to try and stop an outbreak on
(12:55):
a game board that looks like a map. And I
was reading some interviews with the Dinner and he and
this is the guy who created the guy who sat
down and wrote out this game, planned it out. And
he pointed out that when he if he plays the
game by himself, like controlling all say four players, And again,
this is a game where part of it is people
have to get along and collaborate and potentially fight with
(13:16):
each other about what are the best moves to initiate.
There's no leader per se, not an officially prescribed leader,
so they have to kind of figure it out and
decide what their group tactic is going to be, or
or they're or if they're just going to fight about things.
But even even with this situation in place, he pointed
out that when he was playing a game controlling all
(13:36):
four players, he generally did not do as good as
four individual players because you're gonna have Each of these
individuals is gonna bring like new uh us new data,
and if if they can work those out, they're going
to actually do better than the guy who created the game.
Well see, and that's that's one of the things that
uh I guess you could say one of the errors
(13:57):
that people make when they talk about protests sometimes and
then video they say that the crowd is irrational or
full of irrational people. And what you're saying is is
that there's you know, pointing to this sort of crowd
intelligence that is happening, and that people aren't actually nuts,
they're not being crazy. A lot of people who are
involved in this crowd are actually pretty pragmatic people. Right. Well,
(14:18):
I think everyone has a rightful fear of mobs, I mean,
and I think that's what plays into this. So so
there's the idea that we know that a mob is
a fearful thing when a when a crowd of people
are out of control and and there's porks with pitchforks
or fire or you know or whatever Frankenstein, right and
Frankenstein in the movie and uh but but no, like
(14:41):
a riot situation is not a good environment, and it
is one that is rightfully feared by by many. So
it's easy to extrapolate that and say, I mean it
ties back into the basic evolution. You know, are you
going to make a type one air or type two air? Right?
And so you look at a large group of people
and you're like, I don't like to look at this.
This is gonna they're out of control. Just look at
the beard on that one guy, you know, like these
(15:03):
dirty bumps. Speaking of this is this is another common
claim that people make that the crowd is poor, right right, yeah,
the it's going to be the masses teaming out there
to tear down the golden palaces of the of the rulers,
right yeah. And this is from an article from Psychology
Today that's actually talking about the reasons why we protests,
and it says people join mass protests to achieve personal
(15:25):
goals that they are otherwise unable to realize, for example,
getting jobs, affordable housing, or getting rid of their debts.
But what counts in terms of people's motivations to protest
is not so much their absolute poverty level, but their
relative poverty that is compared to their peers. Sociologists have
called this a relative deprivation and it is important predictor
of social unrest. So the point is there is that
(15:47):
you might have someone who's protesting at say occupied Wall Street,
who's doing fine. Actually they can put some you know,
fine being meaning they can eat, they have clothes, they
have a place to live. So the point of it, though,
is that the person that occupy Wall Street is saying, Okay, yes,
I know that I'm doing better than this other person,
this this other country. But the fact of the matter
(16:09):
is I live here in this city with these people,
and I should have the same access to opportunities and
resources that this person next to me does, that my
politician does, um, that the blue collar worker does, the
white collar worker does. And it's it's really important that
while we tend to think of the US is a
rich country, the fact of the matter is that the
(16:29):
income gap between the rich and poor is much greater
than anywhere else in the Western world. Um. So statistical
data bears out that the more unequal society is, the
more stressed and unhappy people are, and the more chance
again we have of social unrest. Now, two other ideas
that are I think are pretty closely related that are
brought up in the Psychology Today article one crowd members
(16:50):
are all alike, and that the crowd has no face.
Now the crowd members are all alike. This one is
is one that I think tends to it. It tends
to get be wound up in media coverage, like, for instance,
in in noticing various media outlets covering Occupy Wall Street. Granted,
you only have so many photos to choose from, I'm sure,
(17:12):
I mean, I'm sure a p getty all these places
rolling out a lot of photos, but you tend to
see people gravitating towards particular images, and like, there's just
one of this dude that kind of looks like Andy
and Parks and wreck Um with kind of like one
of these beards I think, I know, yeah, yeah he
and he has like one of these beards, except his
his mustaches shave, so it's kind of looks like giant
wolverine ciders and he's like kind of yelling, and so
(17:34):
you see that picture enough and you're kind of like,
that's the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's kind of burly
dudes with the crazy sideburns, yelling that haven't maybe they
haven't had a bath recently. Well, this is another thing
that that comes up to This came up in the
London riots as well, like how could so many people
from so many different backgrounds, since you know, of all
stripes of life, how could they all be together doing this?
(17:57):
This is impossible, you know because not right next to
Andy from parts of reck, you also have a guy
in a business suit. Um. So it's funny because we've
talked about this before. We like pattern recognition and we
like to keep it simple and easy. But the fact
of the matter is is that all these people are
coming together for a common cause. Um, it's not weird
that there are people from all different walks of life
(18:20):
getting together and protesting right now. But the idea that
the crowd has no face, that's another thing that came up.
You know, this is frequently cited, well, the like the
occupied movement has no leader, you know, so they can't
just shut down this leader or arrest this leader because
the movement is greater. That's true to sort of varying
degrees with with movements, because even in something like Occupy
(18:40):
Wall Street, during these occupied movements, you're going to have
people that are more connected. You're gonna have I mean,
just on a basic level, think of your own friend group. Um,
there are people that are better organizers than others. I
mean just like within you know, my own marriage, my
wife is much better organizer than me. So well, just
even in the personality tests that we all took here
and how stuff works, and some of us were put
(19:02):
in a group and made play with legos, which was
perfectly fine. Us and another group were made to play
with legos unbeknownst to us, and then a third group
had to clean all the floors. That was really weird.
They like doing that. That's what their personality test said. Um,
but you saw one group I'm gonna says, we were
all grouped in like UM dispositions. So in my group
(19:26):
where the creative crazies, and so we made some sort
of toy that made no sense and was inoperable. The
other group made this was amazing to watch. The other
group made this completely streamlined, UM, some sort of vehicle
like with little people, and it was of course it
was in running condition. So yes, you do have people
who are you know, automatically going to start organizing and
(19:49):
helping UM in a protest group situation. And then this
is another one that I found. It the idea that
protests correlate to weather, and this one turns out to
be true, or at least there's some there's some strong
evidence to support the idea. Yeah, there's a Columbia University
study and they used data from nineteen fifties two thousand four,
and the researchers concluded that the likelihood of new conflicts
(20:09):
arising in affected countries, mostly mostly located in the tropics
double during alminio years is compared with wetter, cooler years. Right,
so the hot, dry weather was driving people nuts, raising
their hackles. The the the theory goes right, and uh,
this they say, we believe this finding represents the first
(20:30):
major evidence that global climate is a major factor in
organized violence around the world. This was said by Solomon
his Young, the leader, the lead author of the study,
who conducted all the research at Columba University. And then
another thing too, the Psychology Today article. I can't remember
if it actually went into this, but you know, the
recent upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa really
(20:51):
can be traced to the region's youth, because we're talking
about millions of young people facing widespread unemployment and seeing
an earth of opportunities ahead of them. So you know,
again we're seeing a lot of these sort of themes
coming up, opportunities lack of them. You know, you look
at Occupy Wall Street and you know, some people have
sort of made light of that because there's some there's
some yoga going on, there's some hacky sack playing. Um. Again,
(21:15):
some of the people that are in that group, Um,
you might point to and say, but you've got it,
You've got it. Fine, Well I think we should we
should see more yoga practice. Actually we should. It's a
really good idea on both sides. Yeah. Um, but again,
there is this this sense that that there is injustice
going on that needs to be right it. All right, Well,
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
(21:35):
we're going to discuss crowd psychology a little more and
get into what you can do to protect yourself when
you encounter a protests with This podcast is brought to
you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel.
At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark which drives innovation.
(21:56):
Join us at curiosity dot com and explore the answers
to life's questions. All right, we're back crowd psychology the
group think in action. UM. We mentioned a little earlier
the idea that four people playing a game are going
to do better than one person playing a game. That
(22:16):
if you that the street is wiser than the individual,
and that and that if you were to pull a
number of individuals in a group about a particular topic, UM,
on average, they would get it right. This is the
classic like, I guess how many jelly beans are are
in that bottle? Right? But if you want to kill
this jelly being phenomenon, the one thing that will do
(22:38):
it really well, aside from I guess like putting a
hall of cylinder in the middle of the jelly beans
or something, would be uh to aggregate the information when
the When the information is aggregated amongst the people being pulled,
drastic fall off and crowd wisdoms. So is that when
people become informed of others decisions? Yeah, or I think, um,
it's it's like, for instance, when you can if you
(23:00):
all everybody and you ask him a question such as, um,
do you think the President of the United States as
a US citizen? And then but but then if you
expose them to poll data shows that a large number
of people are in question about it or or say
global warming is another one where if you're exposed people
to enough polls and enough data that represents the idea
(23:20):
that hey, lots of people think this is uh, this
is bunk, then people's uh wisdom on the data on
the matter will be affected. Well see. And I think
that's really important when you're talking about crowd psychology, right,
because yes, there there's a self organizing aspect to it, um.
But when you are sharing data and you know you
do hear everybody else's opinions, I mean, that's when you
(23:41):
can start to go a bit awry and logic. So, yes,
they're they're the crowd. The most part is rational, but
we've seen it turned irrationally, especially if it if it
is being controlled and people are being told what to
what to think. I mean, one thing to keep in
mind with protests. As much as we we like to
discuss the really good examples of protests, UM, one of
(24:01):
the most successful protests in the twentieth century was, in
some respects the Nazi Party. I remember the rise of
the Nazi Party in Germany. H A lot of that
began as protests, and then the protests were successful enough
that they ended up becoming the government. So yeah, that's
interesting to think of it that way and how that
(24:22):
that error in logic rose to to really just yeah,
and for every great example of civil rights protests out there,
you can find another equally disturbing um say, klan klu
klux klan group thing going on as well. So that's
just something to keep in mind about the free market
of ideas and the use of protests to try and
(24:43):
turn the tide of public sentiment. This is interesting too.
This is from psychologist Clifford Stock at the University of
Liverpool in England. He has a theory of crowd behavior
called the elaborated social identity model. This holds that individuals
and crowd do keep thinking for themselves, um on top
but their individual identities, though they also develop a makeshift
social identity which includes everyone else in the group. When
(25:06):
the group faces oppositions such as police indiscriminately bashing it's
the members of the group with batons. The social identity
congeals members of the group began to work together to
fight with it sees as common oppressors. So that's that
maybe some sort of insight, uh, particularly into the Nazi
example that you're talking about that if someone, if the
(25:28):
group feels on some level that there in danger, then
all of a sudden, your your individualism will seed to
group think. Yeah, which explains a lot of why a
protest can be successful and also why it can potentially
collapse into violence. Okay, let's say it all goes to poo.
What do we do? Well? Um, it depends exactly how
(25:50):
it goes to poo. Actually, UM, I'll tell you one
thing to keep in mind. We reference this earlier when
we brought up the idea of our bosses tear gassing
us tear gas. I just wrote an article about this
for Housta Works, How tear gas Works, which should be
on the site by the time this episode airs. And uh,
there are a number of things to do if you
get tear gas. First of all, tear gas is it's
(26:10):
commonly used as actually cs gas, and it is generally
not lethal. It is less lethal if you want to
get technical, though. It is also technically a chemical weapon,
and it's used just around the world no matter what
country you're talking about, because it is an effective riot
control agent. And the reason is because if you were
hit with tear gas, you pretty much are only concerned
with the horrendous burning in your eyes, in your mouth,
(26:33):
possibly in your lungs, and on your skin. It really
tends to simplify a situation what starts off as you know,
I believe that people of my generation don't have a
proper say and government blah blah blah. It ends up
devolving into, oh, my goodness, I need to get some
water on my face now. And so people tend to scatter,
and certainly, if you were tear gas, scattering is a
good idea provided you can see where you're going and
(26:56):
there's not a danger in running, because you want to
get away from the source of the tear gas. And
then you're gonna want to if you have if you
have contacts in you're gonna want to get those out,
preferably with hands that have not been and so clean
hands beings like you know, if you can find somebody
who can jab them out of your eyes for you,
or or preferably medical relief. A lot of protests, you're
(27:20):
gonna have some people on hand to provide medical support
afterwards for individuals who have who have been pure gas.
So ideally, like you would have safety goggles on, you
would have some sort of surgical gloves on, you might
look odd. But you also see individuals attending protest with
gas mass with be they you know, commercially available gas
mask or improvised gas masks. I'm not saying do that,
(27:42):
but some people. If you don't have it, you know,
try a scarf. That's not as effective. But obviously there
are things that you can do to prepare if you
if you think that you will be in the middle
of a protest. Yeah, the big thing with tear gas
is you want to get away from it. You want
to get it off of you, and then you'll probably
be okay. Prolonged exposure that's where things get dangerous. And
this is kind of a observation, but it probably bears
(28:04):
mentioning that if you don't want to get hit with
tear gas, if you don't want uh the police to
uh maybe aggravate you a bit, do not be in
the front lines. Try to be on the periphery of
the crowd. Um. Of course, that would make a really
crappy protest if everybody did that, but if this is
what you're trying to avoid, then it makes sense that
(28:26):
you would back off a little bit. Yeah. Oh and
then the other thing too, if you get it on
your clothing, you're gonna take that. Take those clothing items
off as soon as possible. You're gonna want to shower.
And if you have it on your your shirt, you
might want to consider cutting the shirt off if it
has to be removed over your head, because otherwise you're
going to be dragging a tear gas coat shirt across
your face. So just another small thing to worry about there.
(28:49):
But then also it's worth knowing that some individuals are
are going to be hyper sensitive to tear gas, and
that's certainly a situation to be aware of. But then
also some people have a surprising immunity to to your gas. Right,
so there's no way to know unless you have been gassed, really,
but you know, well, I mean you can know if
you have a heightened the immunity. You mean, you may
have like a compromised immune system. If you were a child,
(29:10):
if you weren't an elderly individual, then that's a pretty
good sign that to your gas is going to have
a rougher effect on you. Yeah, let's talk about policing too,
because obviously the police are there, they're not trying to
be the bad guys. Sometimes things happen and they inadvertently
end up being the bad guys. They didn't set out
to be the bad guys. That's a very difficult position
for someone to be in, stressful, it's potentially dangerous for
(29:31):
them and for you. So, you know, how do you
behave if if you are confronted by a police officer, Well,
a lot of it. I mean it lines up basically
what Gandhi was saying, right, I mean, if if some
if some dude is is clubbing people in front of you,
or I mean not even clubbing, if they're just say, right,
you know, resting everybody inside. If you were passive, if
you are visibly not a threat, then you're you're going
(29:56):
to be better off. You're less likely to to probably
be beat with a a baton or um, to be
put in a position of aggression by a police officer.
That of course, we have seen examples before where that's
not necessarily true. But if this is something that you're
doing again, you've got to keep that in mind. Um,
And what do you do if a police officer or
someone else in the crowd becomes very aggressive with you?
(30:19):
I mean, there are actually a couple of things that
you can think about doing. It takes foresight and it
takes all a lot of concentration, but you can help
to diffuse a situation. Well, um, one of the this
comes from the book How to Want to Fight that
we're looking at and then certainly we're not we're certainly
not advocating getting in a fight with anybody. You're not
advocating this this book, per se. We're just there's some
(30:40):
information in it that was helpful. Yeah, And one of
one of these was that if you were in a
situation where where someone is acting aggressively towards you, and
in a protest environment, this could be even one of
your fellow protesters, that things get out of hand. Um,
they say, if you were to say something confusing or
perplexing that that is, that is out of character with
the situation, that can help if only providing like one
(31:04):
brief moment to slip away or to or to distill
the aggression of the other. End. Right, So if someone
were about it seemed like someone was about to attack you,
then you could calmly say to them something like do
you know what time it is? Which sounds ridiculous, but
really what's happening is that it's creating this this mental
sort of flicker in their brains, and it's cognitive dissonance, right,
(31:26):
because they're like what, who cares what? Because they would
expect someone to say, like occupy this or back off pig, right.
I mean that's the kind of that's kind of the
kind of stuff that that someone in an aggressive mindset
in that situation might expect them to say. And if
you don't play along with that, with that transcript, right,
with a social role that you're playing right right, then
(31:46):
that that can potentially help diffuse the situation. Yeah. And
another effective thing to do is to calmly, again, calmly
say something along the lines of, you know, there are
a lot of surveillance cameras around here, or there are
a lot of people with video surveillance UM or you know,
cell phone video, so that you can get that person
to back out of their heads a little bit and
(32:07):
and sort of see the big picture of the situation
and maybe even think, okay, this is you know, someone's
about to record, um, some sort of transgression on my part. Yeah.
And if you manage to make it away from a
protest that has fallen apart into some sort of violent situation,
take it an indirect route home, don't don't go the
(32:28):
direct route necessarily. Yeah, I read that, and I wondered
about that. Um, is this I wondered if this was
a sort of extension of police going after people. Um,
although I'm assuming that if you're on your way home,
you're probably out of nabbing distance, I think that. Yeah,
I think this one just basically it's kind of like
you're being herded into arrest kind of a situation. It's about,
(32:50):
you know, arrest avoidance. And that's the other thing. If
someone is trying to arrest you at a protest, you
should probably just comply and be arrested. Really, I mean,
I mean, certainly we're not to advocate that anyone try
to avoid arrest lawful arrest, but I mean, if it's
a situation between being chased down or hit with the
rupper bullet versus giving yourself up to the authorities that
(33:11):
are cracking down in the protests, you know, and if
you're about to get caught to this is sort of interesting. Again,
it's from from the book, but they were basically saying
that it sounds querintuitive, but if you're about to get struck,
you should try to relax your muscles. Yeah. The reason
is because your reaction time is going to be a
lot slower if you lock up all your muscles in
(33:31):
anticipation of a blow. So if you're going to try
to avoid it, then that's what you'd want to do.
I mean, it's very kind of kung fu, right, because
you know it looks like a batter on the mound, right.
If the batter is stressed out, they're not going to
have as they may be as powerful as all get out,
but they're not gonna have as much control over this swing. Yeah.
And and this is this is kind of funny. From
the book, they said when a drillin hits your system,
(33:51):
you become tougher and more resilient. But the downside is
that you become a one task, knuckle dragging troglodyte. So
the more stressed you are, the more your body shuts down.
And we're talking from fine motor skills like finger dexterity
and I hand coordination to the loss of depth perception
and then of course irrational thinking. So there's just some
ideas about how you might respond to a protest environment. Yeah,
(34:16):
and and this again, this is sort of timely. This
piece of information to um in the final hours of
protest um. But you know, when the permits are about
to expire, this is usually when the police make most
of their arrests because now they can kind of charge
in and do that. So so go early and leave
(34:36):
while they're wanting you to stay right exactly like basically,
like with any party, leave on a high note. So
let's leave on a high note on this one then, UM.
And though certainly we invite any ideas and opinions related
to this topic, because because this is more than than
than a lot of them, there's some aspects of it
that are that are open to interpretation in terms of
like what, for instance, what the best response is. I
(34:59):
mean these right, Yeah, I would love to hear from
people who have perhaps been in many protests before, what
have your experiences been like? And then what has it
been like when people like try to keep it cool
and try to you know, try to engage in non
violence and uh and and passive responses to all of
this be honesty to hear a new tails. I'd love
to leave off with a quote from Martin Luther King
(35:21):
about his take on the psychology of the disenfranchised. There
is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with
a large segment of people in that society who feel
that they have no stake in it, who feel that
they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake
in their society protect that society, but when they don't
have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it. That's a
pretty stage. Words from Martin Luther King. Well, hey, I'm
(35:44):
gonna reach into the listener mail folder if the robot
will hand it to me. Thank you, robot. So this
one here is from Hannah Hannah wrightesin and says, Dear
Robert and Julie, I recently listened to your podcast on
sports and was intrigued by a passing bit event from Nation.
When you were talking about the brain simulating throwing a
baseball when watching baseball being baseball being thrown, Robert mentioned
(36:07):
the brain doing the same while reading. As the family's
resident bookworm, it has been pointed out to me that
while reading, I make a lot of facial expressions. My
parents and sister tease me for this, but I have
found that these expressions are not of my reaction to
the book, but reflect the emotions of the characters. For example,
of a character's browse for a mine will be as well.
I always attributed this to general quirkiness, but it was
(36:29):
fascinating to hear that, hear what might be going on
in my head. I love the podcast You guys make
College Apps season a lot less stressful, Oh college application, Susan. Yeah,
as opposed to like something on your phone? Yeah yeah,
um yeah, that's that's interesting. I mean her her mirror
neurons were definitely at work there. And I was just
thinking too about the Imaginary Friends podcast that we did
(36:52):
and which we talked about the authors sometimes engaging with
the characters are creating as imaginary friends, in fact thinking
of them as imaginary friend and so a lot of
that plays into it, the empathy part um. I have
one quick email from a listener named Savar, and Savar said,
I just heard your last podcast and heard Julie say
that adrenaline fledgs your body. I'm a biology student. I
(37:14):
just recently found out that the amount of adrenaline needed
to trigger the fight or flight response is actually minuscule.
Adrenaline has roughly the same concentration in your body as
an aspirin tablet dissolved an Olympic sized swimming pool. Okay,
so that was kind of that's pretty fascinating, right, like
that that that amount could make you feel as that
you were having adrenaline rush, like you as if you
(37:36):
were being flooded with adrenaline that you're not, so thank you, savar. Alright, Well,
if you guys have any tidbits to share with us, uh,
you know, especially about protests, your own experiences with them,
your own thoughts about them, uh, and about I mean
just the the idea of protests is this social thing.
I mean, that's what fascinates me the most, um and
certainly just what engaged me the most, and writing that
(37:57):
article about protests. Share them with We are on Facebook
and Twitter, We're blow the Mind on both of those
and you can always share your thoughts by sending us
an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as
(38:19):
we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.