March 18, 2022 • 26 mins
Why do crowds move us?
Being part of a crowd can embolden us: we might raise our voices in protest at a march, or snort-laugh more at a sold-out comedy gig. But in the popular imagination, big crowds are often associated with danger - with hysteria and violence. From the Hajj to a heavy metal concert, how does being surrounded by others change our behavior?
Dessa talks with a psychologist, a mathematician, an activist, and a legendary DJ to find out how we are moved by crowds.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
As a musician. Tour is my favorite and least favorite
part of the job. You've got long drives, gas station sandwiches,
shared hotel bathrooms, but on the good nights you also
get them Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people collected into
one room feeling the same way at the same time.
(00:29):
Sometimes you feel like an entertainer, but sometimes it feels
like a rally, or like you're at church. I'm not
a religious or a spiritual person, but that simultaneity of
shared experience, it's a communion. Everybody lit up by the
music and by one another. My name is Dessa. The
name of the podcast you're attending is deeply human, and
(00:50):
today we're asking why did crowds move you? Let the
show begin. The first act on the bill is a
master of crowd control and not too modest to tell
you all about it. Hi, my name is cybers Sounds.
I'm very famous in New York. Cifa is a live
DJ in a stand up comic and it's like cent
in New York. Listen. I'm an expert name dropper. My
(01:13):
first big gig ever was with Little Kimp. I worked
with everybody uh DJ Wise ninety seven, Wise jay z
I broke Rihanna, I broke Rick Ross, very instrumental and breaking.
Sean Paul Cipher's Instagram page is chock full of vintage
picks of him cheessing with Kanye and Dave Chappelle, t
I and Snoop Dogg. He's been in the game a
(01:35):
long time. When you perform as a DJ live, can
you explain what crowd control is? I have this knack
to read the crowd. It's definitely my gift. I go
into like this trance where I see the crowd as
like colors and pockets of movement, and I'll be DJ
(01:56):
for a thousand people and I'll look over to the
left and I'll see like a group of twenty not
really dancing for whatever reason, and my my honing skills
tune into that part because that twenty people not dancing
could turn into a virus and spread and make the
crowd not you know, they could make the whole party flop.
So when you talk about room reading, you know, and
(02:18):
so you're looking for motion, can you give me some
of the other indicators, Like, um, if you see blue faces,
that means people are looking at their screens, you know
what I mean, Which means that they're maybe not attending
to the show. What else are you looking for besides movement?
This movement? There's body language, there's facial expression. There's a
thing where like the quick look at the booth. So
(02:38):
you're playing a couple of songs and then you play
a song that people don't like, and you will see
some girls that quickly look at the booth like what
do you? What is this? You know what I mean?
And that hurts. But Sifa is a consummate pro who
knows exactly what to spin to start the party. He
can calculate the average age of the crowd and then
consult the spreadsheet in his head of the song that
(02:58):
would have been chart top during their high school years.
Nostalgia tracks are strong medicine, and he gets on the
mic himself to lure the first bodies to the dance floor.
There's usually like some girls that are ready to party
and they're like starting to move early, and I and
I even say, hey, you are his shirt, like I
(03:20):
got you, you know what I mean, I feel your vibe.
I'm doing this for you. And then they feel special
and they start opening up and I'm like, tell your
friends to come out, and they come on come out,
you know, And they come out and they start there,
and then then a group of other people are like, yo,
don't let them have all the fun, and the other
people start coming. You'll see it, like the floor start
(03:40):
to get filled up. As a comic, Piper's home base
is at the Comedy Seller in Manhattan. It's a world
famous joint, this little dim basement room that does three
or four shows a night. Tickets are cheap, beers are expensive,
and people line up down the block to get in.
Our guys, Sip usually plays the role of the host,
reading the audience and doing little bits in between sets.
(04:03):
So I'm the first guy, you see, and I have
ten minutes to get that crowd ready for the show. Comedians,
as soon as they walk in the building, the first
question is like, how's the crowd? How's the crowd? Always,
you know, there's a feeling that's gestalt bigger than the
individual people at individual tables, and Cypher's job is to
prime the crowd. When he delivers, these people perfectly prepared
(04:26):
to be entertained. Comics know it and appreciate it, and
they'll give me a look like, oh this is this.
You got this crowd right? So what makes a good
crowd good? Let's pass the mic to Ann Templeton, a
lecturer and social psychology at the University of Edinburgh in
the UK. She researches what she calls a psychological crowd,
(04:47):
a massive people who have more in common than just
sharing the same physical space. So that is where you
have a crowd of people who have a sense of
connection to each other. They feel like the part of
the same group, like a concert where everybody knows all
the words, or protest where everyone is marching for the
same cause. We're more likely to provide help to people
(05:09):
we see as being in the same group as as
we feel closer to them. Are more likely to share resources,
whether that's water or bottle of alcohol or food with
people who are in our group. Multiple psychological crowds can
often exist within a single physical one. I think of
a sports game where some sections are racking the home
(05:30):
team jerseys and others are rooting for the visitors. And
says that feeling connected to the people in a psychological
crowd changes our behavior, can even change the way we
Locomo I did a series of study start my PhD.
We essentially found that when people are in a psychological
crowd compared to physical crowd, the state in closer proximity
(05:52):
with one another and larger subgroups within the crowd. So
what seems to be happening is that group members or
try to stay together with other group members, and they'll
even reduce their speed and kind of walk further in
order to stay together. To research really vast assemblies of people,
and has studied the Hajj, the trip to Mecca, the
(06:14):
practicing Muslims are expected to make at least once in
their lives. The hash is one of the most densely
populated crowds I've ever seen pilgrims. They're really kind of
packed together, and they can be up to twelve people
per square meter, which is so dense that you're actually
like lifted up by the crowd. They found that the
(06:37):
more people felt like they were part of a group,
the safer they felt in the crowd, and that actually
increased in more dense areas. For people who had lower
identification with the crowds, so who didn't feel as much
part of the group with the others, we see the
opposite effect. So the more dense area was, the less
safe they actually felt. You know what, The out stands
(07:00):
for you know what the norms are, what the kind
of values are of that crowd, and you act within them.
So when people are with fellow group members, they feel
more empowered to act certain waysted Wi anyway, So what
does that mean exactly? What does it look like to
be empowered to do something bold? Electrified by the crowd.
(07:21):
Let's queue up our next cameo, Hey, I'm Gonzia and
I make stuff, and I make what some people referred
to as art. Ganzer is a street artist who grew
up in Cairo, Egypt. He does large scale murals, sometimes
several stories high, and most of it is overtly political.
He gained international attention during the Arab Spring in two
(07:41):
thousand eleven. Ganzer was at a friend's house one day
when his Twitter feed blew up with news of a
protest on the streets, and one post in particular grabbed
his attention. A friend was live broadcasting video from what
looked like a very big march headed towards the rear square.
I just left it out to see what was up,
and I just so happened to arrive at exactly that
(08:04):
that moment when kind of that big march, those protesters
arrived to the square, and the square was really blocked
off by so much right please. The square was lined
with people watching, waiting to find out what would happen
when such a surge of marchers met the police lines.
A lot of people weren't intending on participating in protest,
myself included. And then when the protesters did in fact
(08:27):
arrive without kind of words being exchanged or anything, is
just like, okay, they want to make it through, and
so they just kept on marching. And then the police
of their reaction was to use their sticks and batons
and whatever to hit the protesters. And seeing that, witnessing
that so so up close, just prompted people to kind
of go crazy, like this is unacceptable. That's when the
(08:50):
crowd got big. There was a billboard in the middle
of the Tiger Square that advertised the main political part
Preaty that has been in power for a long time,
or wasn't power up until that point, which is Mubarak's
U political party in two thousand eleven, who's named Mubarak
had been in power for thirty years, heading a regime
(09:12):
that many Egyptians were decrying as corrupt and repressive. I
felt like, okay, so eventually they're going to crack down
on this protest and there will be no sign of it,
you know. So I had a spray paint in my backpack.
I climbed the billboard and spray painted on the back
of it, basically what what everyone was chanting, which was
down with mbaruk. When they saw me climbed the billboard,
(09:33):
they started like shouting at me, telling me like to
come down, and there was definitely the sense of everyone
wanted it was very very keen on the protest being peaceful.
So people started chatting at me and I just sort
of gestured with my hands tell everyone to calm down.
It's not what you think. And then I pulled out
the spray paint from the backpack and then as soon
(09:54):
as they saw that then they kind of started like
encouraged me, like oh okay, yeah, spray something. And before
I had even completed the sentence, everyone started to really
cheer quite loudly on clap and you could hear it
going throughout the square. Do you think that this is
something that you would have ever done if you weren't
in a crowd. No, it was a crowd based right,
(10:18):
It's like myself being moved by the crowd and and
literally my arms just being told to write what they
were saying. You know what I mean. That's like would
never have happened without being in that crowd, for sure.
The voices embodies around him gave Ganzier the nerve to
act on a brave impulse. He'd been critical of the
(10:39):
government before, but in that square, in that moment, he
became the mouthpiece of the crowd in a way that
he had never previously anticipated or experienced. He had this
feeling of total connection, and other people in the crowd
seemed to feel it too. People were banding together, helping
one another. Police forces, in an attempt to dissolve the assembly,
(11:00):
fired tear gas into the crowd. Ginzer had never seen
tear gas before, and after the boom of the shot,
he says, there was a moment of stillness, then panic,
but momentarily the canister was flying back towards the police.
Someone must have picked it up and thrown it by hand.
It did feel quite magical in a sense. I think
(11:21):
there was just this feeling of complete non existence of
the ego of the self, and it was it was
really the collective us individually, like each person is different,
you know, each person has different interests, different concerns, different jobs.
(11:42):
But then in that moment, in that space, everyone there
was a feeling that like, none of that, none of
that is really important without dealing with this other thing
first for everyone, you know, and I remember just being
moved by the various actions that every one was doing.
Selflessness was really just contagious, and it was just sort
(12:05):
of echoing off of each and every single person in
the square in that moment. Ganzer eventually left Cairo and
moved to the US, in part because he was being
singled out by Egyptian media outlets sympathetic to the government.
In print, online, and on TV. The protesters at to
Rear Square were described as thugs, rioters, and outlaws. In
(12:28):
the press, images of big crowds are often accompanied by
messages of concern. Big congregations of people are sometimes portrayed
as fundamentally criminal or particularly susceptible to base animalistic impulses,
and Templeton are crowd expert says that there's a very
specific reason for those associations. Generally, I get the sense
(12:52):
that you think that crowds got a bad rap, but
like there's been a lot of heterism on crowds. Well,
do a quick walkdown history ly so one of the
original kind of crowd theorists was Gustave Lebon, and he
was advocating how terrible crowds were during the Paris community.
For those of you feeling a little rusty and nineteenth
(13:14):
century Parisian history, the Paris Commune was a short lived
revolutionary government led by common people. It was the product
of a working class insurrection in the city, masses of
people revolting against French federal rule. And this character, Gustave
Lebon was not a fan of democracy. He was really
promoting this idea that crowds are these irrational, spineless masses.
(13:38):
It just needs to be controlled by a good leader.
And says, a lot of our modern ideas about crowds
stem from Lebon's not so thinly veiled classism. He kind
of popularized this notional crowds and that persisted and persisted,
and you look at media coverage even now, you see
things like stampedes. You see about the irrational mobs and
(13:59):
talk about mentality, so they really do get a bad rap.
Would he still consider a group of people at the
opera a crowd. So Christ in the upper early they
were absolutely fine. But the working classes here were revolting. No, no,
they were irrational, they were mindless. Sometimes violence does erupt
within a crowd, but Ann says that the majority of
(14:22):
people don't exhibit disregard, let alone malice for one another,
even in desperate circumstances. If you look at the Manchester
Arena attack from the Ariana Grande concert, we saw great
examples of people going back in and helping one another.
In two thousand seventeen, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive
at a concert in Manchester, England, right after the singer
(14:44):
Ariana Grande finished her last song. There were over fourteen
thousand people at that show and twenty two of them
died amid the fear and the confusion right after the blast.
Crowd members were there for one another. They're performing for
us to aid to each other. They were giving emotionals, support,
they were sharing Walter all before emergency services were able
to get into the building, the cards were already performing
(15:07):
amazing coordination to support one another, to match up children
with their families, for parents to look after kids, and
recommends that authorities and emergency personnel work with the crowd
instead of focusing on gaining control of it. The crowd
is often pretty good at taking care of itself. Did
(15:32):
you know that in the UK they call an intermission
an interval? I just found out myself two countries separated
by a common language. Man, Okay, this is radio, so
we gotta be quick about this. You've got, let's say,
eight seconds to visit the bathroom, get a refreshment, and
return to your seat, and we're all settled back in fantastic.
(16:02):
From up here on stage, you can see little ripples
of motion moving across an audience. Having been a performer
myself for most of my adult life, it's still fascinating
to me to watch all the varied ways that crowds move.
For example, I recently finished it tour opening for a
band called Thievery Corporation. Their stuff has big drumbeats, sitar,
(16:23):
kind of groovy vocals, and during our set, the motion
of their audience is so different than what I'm used
to seeing at my own gigs that at first it
was downright disorienting. Like is a hip hop artist, I'm
accustomed to staccato gestures fans with one arm up, beating
in time to the music, whereas this thievery crowd was
way way looser. After our first show together, my bandmate
(16:46):
Joshua described it as a kelp forest, This vast sea
of fluid, undulating bodies cipher sounds the very famous in
New York crowd whisperer sees the same thing when he's
up there in the DJ. Depending the type of music
and the type of party, you will see like like
ocean waves, Synchronized dancing or swaying is usually a great
(17:09):
sign for a performer, an indicator that the audience is
swept up in the same feeling. But sometimes movements sweeping
through a crowd can be dangerous. Let's welcome our next
guest to center stage. Will you introduce yourself to me
as you would have at a party? Oh? Right, at
a party, I would say, hi, a Marianna, I do physics,
(17:31):
and you would say, oh, physics. Oh I was so
bad in physics, buz no. But that's what everyone says
without realizing I also was very, very budding in physics.
Ariana Batanelli is an editor of the journal Communications Physics.
She's also an applied mathematician with a background in theoretical
(17:53):
physics and a passion for crowd movement and behavior. Under
certain conditions, the physical forces are crowd movement can overwhelm
the people in it. So if you have a little
bit of space in front of you and you all
want to get to the festivals as soon as possible,
as long as someone takes some little step forward, you
will take another step forward. And so at some point
(18:14):
the pressure builds up from the back to the front,
and in the front you see people basically start to
bobbling left and right. So there starts being some sort
of waves into the crowd where people can't really do
anything and being transport by the wave. And then in
that condition it can happen that like maybe two waves
(18:35):
crush or you get smashed into a wall and something
like that. And yeah, so that's pretty ugly. Okay, So
you focused a lot on crowd density and like high
density crowds, how many people and how tightly packed you
have to be to be identity. So there is six
seven people per square meters, six or seven people for
square met Okay, So for those of us who don't
(18:55):
think in meters, how far away am I from the
other people? Here's super squeezed by these people, Like you
wouldn't be able to fit seven person in a square
meter unless you have a box around the square meter,
like I'm tight, Like I can smell other people's wine
and stuff, like I'm I'm being touched. My body is touched.
H Yeah, definitely, the forces at play in these high
(19:20):
density crowds can get intense enough to seriously hurt people.
The disaster at the Astro World Festival in Houston, Texas
was a tragic case. And point and Templeton you might remember,
mentioned that at the Hajje, densities can reach a dozen
people per square meter. At the two fifteen pilgrimage, more
than two thousand people were killed in what's often called
(19:41):
a crowd crush. A crowd crush is basically when the
density it's so high that people can't move freely anymore.
Like sometimes those pressures are so high that people basically well,
they are compressed by the crowd until near lungs can't
expand anymore and you and you choke to death in
(20:04):
the middle of the crowd. It's it's quite horrible. Even
if nobody is pushing, nobody's trying to harm anybody. The
pressure can build. It's just a byproduct of the crowd
itself compressed way, way too tightly. The point is one
it's to dents. It's too late. These super tightly packed
(20:25):
crowds also increase risk of trampling. To try to avoid
these dangers, people like Ariana study the mechanics of dense crowds,
striving to understand the precise manner in which human bodies
crammed together. As it turns out, some of the answers
to their questions might be found in green silos. Let
me explain, Farmers, after harvesting their grain, store it in silos.
(20:49):
Retrieving this grain later, however, sometimes proves hazardous. Like if
you open the silo from the bottom trying to take
out those grains, then you have those like large scale reactions.
The grain and the silos can shift, compact and create
pressure waves that get crazy intense, and it can create
(21:10):
so much pressure that it basically breaks. The silo blows
my mind. I had no idea. So in some way,
it's like filling a stadium with people was compared to
filling a silo with grain. To make sure that we
don't smash the people or explode the silo A Researchers
have also discovered some useful mathematical parallels in studying coffee beans.
(21:34):
For example, in answering questions about evacuation planning, what is
the optimal size of a door in order for the
evacuation to be fast as possible, because like as with
coffee beans, like they can clog and people can clog.
And they found out that you can have an ob
stockhold if you put an obstacle in the right place
(21:56):
in front of the door. Actually, people have our force
to alternate. Counterintuitively, placing a carefully designed impediment in the
path of a crowd can keep foot traffic flowing, preventing
people from clogging exits. And even if you're not designing
evacuation routes, here's a bit of news you can use
from a high density crowd researcher. Think about how difficult
(22:17):
it can be to move through a pack concert, trying
to get out of the throng in the center of
the floor to go to the bathroom or make your
way to coat check. It involves a lot of mumbled apologies,
the risk of slashing beer on somebody's new kicks, and
a lot of low key body checking. But there is
a solution. If everyone is facing the stage, for example,
and you want to get out, you want to move
(22:39):
diagonally towards the stage to extract yourself from the crowd,
make your way towards one of the sidewalls while also
moving forward towards the stage a bit boom. First in
line at the restaurant. Look at you, Look at you.
Even though much of Ariana's research has focused on crowd
(22:59):
worst case scenarios, let the record show she's not always
all serious. I've been in a few more spits. Yeah, okay.
She also talks real casually about some concert phenomenon called
the Wall of Death. Like it's people running around because
at some point they decide that it's cool to run around,
or the wall of death. You ever seen any Excuse me,
(23:19):
I have no idea what you're talking about. At some
point someone screams the world death or whatever, and the
crowd separates into hols, and it's like then it becomes
like a medieval movie where they start running towards each
other and then they crash in the middle, like just smashing,
like two walls smashing through. Does everybody sorry, producers in
(23:41):
the room, do you guys know what this is. Everybody
knows what this is. I am not metal enough to
have witnessed a wall of death, but I do absolutely
know what it feels like to be moved by something
not quite tangible that circulates in a crowded room. It's
a mood, it's a buzz. It's like everyone there is
plugged into some shared circuit. Take comedy shows, for instance,
(24:04):
like the one Cipher hosts. Laughter is contagious. It's a
feeling that if the comedians good or the jokes are good,
they shot something into the air and everyone felt it
at the exact same time. It had an involuntary response.
It's like a crowd has emergent properties of its own.
There's a positive feedback loop as feelings and movements spread
(24:26):
and get amplified, like when a good DJ is spinning.
The audience performs for itself. The dancers work it, Strangers
make way for one another, mouth the words at each other.
It's like a tiny culture develops there in that one place,
a little society that lasts for only one night. And
I love when somebody just walks in and they immediately
(24:47):
start dancing, like they danced their way to the dance floor.
That's how you know you're killing it, because, like, the
music is always going to be the music. But what
they're feeling when they walk in is the vibe? Is
it a collective vibe? Is it a vibe that in
part is generated by the crowd? Oh? Absolutely, there's no
other way to create a vibe in that environment. You know,
(25:08):
the music is what they're hearing, and the vibe is
what they're feeling. I've spent a considerable portion of my
life chasing that feeling, that vibe, a tour from city
to city with my band, and every night on stage,
I try to say the right thing, or sing the
right song, or lift my arm into the light. It's
just the right moment so that a room full of
(25:30):
strangers will feel, for a while at least united, connected
enough to let down our defenses and allow ourselves to
be moved in one another's company and buy one another's company. Okay,
to the end, you guys, A final bow from our
(25:52):
guests and Templeton ganzer Ariana about a Nelly and of
course cipher sounds. You got room, Idessa have been your
host this evening. What James such a smart alec in
the booth James turn the clapping back on Thank You.
(26:15):
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public
media co production with I Heart Media, and it's hosted
by Messa. Find me online at Duessa on Instagram and
Dussa Darling on Twitter. Be at home Safe everybody caffeine, nicotine, alcohol.
(26:35):
Almost everyone in the world uses some sort of drug, drink,
and drugs have played a huge role not only in
our social lives, but in civic and sometimes religious life too.
Next time on deeply Human, I'm asking why do we
use intoxicans?
As a musician. Tour is my favorite and least favorite
part of the job. You've got long drives, gas station sandwiches,
shared hotel bathrooms, but on the good nights you also
get them Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people collected into
one room feeling the same way at the same time.
(00:29):
Sometimes you feel like an entertainer, but sometimes it feels
like a rally, or like you're at church. I'm not
a religious or a spiritual person, but that simultaneity of
shared experience, it's a communion. Everybody lit up by the
music and by one another. My name is Dessa. The
name of the podcast you're attending is deeply human, and
(00:50):
today we're asking why did crowds move you? Let the
show begin. The first act on the bill is a
master of crowd control and not too modest to tell
you all about it. Hi, my name is cybers Sounds.
I'm very famous in New York. Cifa is a live
DJ in a stand up comic and it's like cent
in New York. Listen. I'm an expert name dropper. My
(01:13):
first big gig ever was with Little Kimp. I worked
with everybody uh DJ Wise ninety seven, Wise jay z
I broke Rihanna, I broke Rick Ross, very instrumental and breaking.
Sean Paul Cipher's Instagram page is chock full of vintage
picks of him cheessing with Kanye and Dave Chappelle, t
I and Snoop Dogg. He's been in the game a
(01:35):
long time. When you perform as a DJ live, can
you explain what crowd control is? I have this knack
to read the crowd. It's definitely my gift. I go
into like this trance where I see the crowd as
like colors and pockets of movement, and I'll be DJ
(01:56):
for a thousand people and I'll look over to the
left and I'll see like a group of twenty not
really dancing for whatever reason, and my my honing skills
tune into that part because that twenty people not dancing
could turn into a virus and spread and make the
crowd not you know, they could make the whole party flop.
So when you talk about room reading, you know, and
(02:18):
so you're looking for motion, can you give me some
of the other indicators, Like, um, if you see blue faces,
that means people are looking at their screens, you know
what I mean, Which means that they're maybe not attending
to the show. What else are you looking for besides movement?
This movement? There's body language, there's facial expression. There's a
thing where like the quick look at the booth. So
(02:38):
you're playing a couple of songs and then you play
a song that people don't like, and you will see
some girls that quickly look at the booth like what
do you? What is this? You know what I mean?
And that hurts. But Sifa is a consummate pro who
knows exactly what to spin to start the party. He
can calculate the average age of the crowd and then
consult the spreadsheet in his head of the song that
(02:58):
would have been chart top during their high school years.
Nostalgia tracks are strong medicine, and he gets on the
mic himself to lure the first bodies to the dance floor.
There's usually like some girls that are ready to party
and they're like starting to move early, and I and
I even say, hey, you are his shirt, like I
(03:20):
got you, you know what I mean, I feel your vibe.
I'm doing this for you. And then they feel special
and they start opening up and I'm like, tell your
friends to come out, and they come on come out,
you know, And they come out and they start there,
and then then a group of other people are like, yo,
don't let them have all the fun, and the other
people start coming. You'll see it, like the floor start
(03:40):
to get filled up. As a comic, Piper's home base
is at the Comedy Seller in Manhattan. It's a world
famous joint, this little dim basement room that does three
or four shows a night. Tickets are cheap, beers are expensive,
and people line up down the block to get in.
Our guys, Sip usually plays the role of the host,
reading the audience and doing little bits in between sets.
(04:03):
So I'm the first guy, you see, and I have
ten minutes to get that crowd ready for the show. Comedians,
as soon as they walk in the building, the first
question is like, how's the crowd? How's the crowd? Always,
you know, there's a feeling that's gestalt bigger than the
individual people at individual tables, and Cypher's job is to
prime the crowd. When he delivers, these people perfectly prepared
(04:26):
to be entertained. Comics know it and appreciate it, and
they'll give me a look like, oh this is this.
You got this crowd right? So what makes a good
crowd good? Let's pass the mic to Ann Templeton, a
lecturer and social psychology at the University of Edinburgh in
the UK. She researches what she calls a psychological crowd,
(04:47):
a massive people who have more in common than just
sharing the same physical space. So that is where you
have a crowd of people who have a sense of
connection to each other. They feel like the part of
the same group, like a concert where everybody knows all
the words, or protest where everyone is marching for the
same cause. We're more likely to provide help to people
(05:09):
we see as being in the same group as as
we feel closer to them. Are more likely to share resources,
whether that's water or bottle of alcohol or food with
people who are in our group. Multiple psychological crowds can
often exist within a single physical one. I think of
a sports game where some sections are racking the home
(05:30):
team jerseys and others are rooting for the visitors. And
says that feeling connected to the people in a psychological
crowd changes our behavior, can even change the way we
Locomo I did a series of study start my PhD.
We essentially found that when people are in a psychological
crowd compared to physical crowd, the state in closer proximity
(05:52):
with one another and larger subgroups within the crowd. So
what seems to be happening is that group members or
try to stay together with other group members, and they'll
even reduce their speed and kind of walk further in
order to stay together. To research really vast assemblies of people,
and has studied the Hajj, the trip to Mecca, the
(06:14):
practicing Muslims are expected to make at least once in
their lives. The hash is one of the most densely
populated crowds I've ever seen pilgrims. They're really kind of
packed together, and they can be up to twelve people
per square meter, which is so dense that you're actually
like lifted up by the crowd. They found that the
(06:37):
more people felt like they were part of a group,
the safer they felt in the crowd, and that actually
increased in more dense areas. For people who had lower
identification with the crowds, so who didn't feel as much
part of the group with the others, we see the
opposite effect. So the more dense area was, the less
safe they actually felt. You know what, The out stands
(07:00):
for you know what the norms are, what the kind
of values are of that crowd, and you act within them.
So when people are with fellow group members, they feel
more empowered to act certain waysted Wi anyway, So what
does that mean exactly? What does it look like to
be empowered to do something bold? Electrified by the crowd.
(07:21):
Let's queue up our next cameo, Hey, I'm Gonzia and
I make stuff, and I make what some people referred
to as art. Ganzer is a street artist who grew
up in Cairo, Egypt. He does large scale murals, sometimes
several stories high, and most of it is overtly political.
He gained international attention during the Arab Spring in two
(07:41):
thousand eleven. Ganzer was at a friend's house one day
when his Twitter feed blew up with news of a
protest on the streets, and one post in particular grabbed
his attention. A friend was live broadcasting video from what
looked like a very big march headed towards the rear square.
I just left it out to see what was up,
and I just so happened to arrive at exactly that
(08:04):
that moment when kind of that big march, those protesters
arrived to the square, and the square was really blocked
off by so much right please. The square was lined
with people watching, waiting to find out what would happen
when such a surge of marchers met the police lines.
A lot of people weren't intending on participating in protest,
myself included. And then when the protesters did in fact
(08:27):
arrive without kind of words being exchanged or anything, is
just like, okay, they want to make it through, and
so they just kept on marching. And then the police
of their reaction was to use their sticks and batons
and whatever to hit the protesters. And seeing that, witnessing
that so so up close, just prompted people to kind
of go crazy, like this is unacceptable. That's when the
(08:50):
crowd got big. There was a billboard in the middle
of the Tiger Square that advertised the main political part
Preaty that has been in power for a long time,
or wasn't power up until that point, which is Mubarak's
U political party in two thousand eleven, who's named Mubarak
had been in power for thirty years, heading a regime
(09:12):
that many Egyptians were decrying as corrupt and repressive. I
felt like, okay, so eventually they're going to crack down
on this protest and there will be no sign of it,
you know. So I had a spray paint in my backpack.
I climbed the billboard and spray painted on the back
of it, basically what what everyone was chanting, which was
down with mbaruk. When they saw me climbed the billboard,
(09:33):
they started like shouting at me, telling me like to
come down, and there was definitely the sense of everyone
wanted it was very very keen on the protest being peaceful.
So people started chatting at me and I just sort
of gestured with my hands tell everyone to calm down.
It's not what you think. And then I pulled out
the spray paint from the backpack and then as soon
(09:54):
as they saw that then they kind of started like
encouraged me, like oh okay, yeah, spray something. And before
I had even completed the sentence, everyone started to really
cheer quite loudly on clap and you could hear it
going throughout the square. Do you think that this is
something that you would have ever done if you weren't
in a crowd. No, it was a crowd based right,
(10:18):
It's like myself being moved by the crowd and and
literally my arms just being told to write what they
were saying. You know what I mean. That's like would
never have happened without being in that crowd, for sure.
The voices embodies around him gave Ganzier the nerve to
act on a brave impulse. He'd been critical of the
(10:39):
government before, but in that square, in that moment, he
became the mouthpiece of the crowd in a way that
he had never previously anticipated or experienced. He had this
feeling of total connection, and other people in the crowd
seemed to feel it too. People were banding together, helping
one another. Police forces, in an attempt to dissolve the assembly,
(11:00):
fired tear gas into the crowd. Ginzer had never seen
tear gas before, and after the boom of the shot,
he says, there was a moment of stillness, then panic,
but momentarily the canister was flying back towards the police.
Someone must have picked it up and thrown it by hand.
It did feel quite magical in a sense. I think
(11:21):
there was just this feeling of complete non existence of
the ego of the self, and it was it was
really the collective us individually, like each person is different,
you know, each person has different interests, different concerns, different jobs.
(11:42):
But then in that moment, in that space, everyone there
was a feeling that like, none of that, none of
that is really important without dealing with this other thing
first for everyone, you know, and I remember just being
moved by the various actions that every one was doing.
Selflessness was really just contagious, and it was just sort
(12:05):
of echoing off of each and every single person in
the square in that moment. Ganzer eventually left Cairo and
moved to the US, in part because he was being
singled out by Egyptian media outlets sympathetic to the government.
In print, online, and on TV. The protesters at to
Rear Square were described as thugs, rioters, and outlaws. In
(12:28):
the press, images of big crowds are often accompanied by
messages of concern. Big congregations of people are sometimes portrayed
as fundamentally criminal or particularly susceptible to base animalistic impulses,
and Templeton are crowd expert says that there's a very
specific reason for those associations. Generally, I get the sense
(12:52):
that you think that crowds got a bad rap, but
like there's been a lot of heterism on crowds. Well,
do a quick walkdown history ly so one of the
original kind of crowd theorists was Gustave Lebon, and he
was advocating how terrible crowds were during the Paris community.
For those of you feeling a little rusty and nineteenth
(13:14):
century Parisian history, the Paris Commune was a short lived
revolutionary government led by common people. It was the product
of a working class insurrection in the city, masses of
people revolting against French federal rule. And this character, Gustave
Lebon was not a fan of democracy. He was really
promoting this idea that crowds are these irrational, spineless masses.
(13:38):
It just needs to be controlled by a good leader.
And says, a lot of our modern ideas about crowds
stem from Lebon's not so thinly veiled classism. He kind
of popularized this notional crowds and that persisted and persisted,
and you look at media coverage even now, you see
things like stampedes. You see about the irrational mobs and
(13:59):
talk about mentality, so they really do get a bad rap.
Would he still consider a group of people at the
opera a crowd. So Christ in the upper early they
were absolutely fine. But the working classes here were revolting. No, no,
they were irrational, they were mindless. Sometimes violence does erupt
within a crowd, but Ann says that the majority of
(14:22):
people don't exhibit disregard, let alone malice for one another,
even in desperate circumstances. If you look at the Manchester
Arena attack from the Ariana Grande concert, we saw great
examples of people going back in and helping one another.
In two thousand seventeen, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive
at a concert in Manchester, England, right after the singer
(14:44):
Ariana Grande finished her last song. There were over fourteen
thousand people at that show and twenty two of them
died amid the fear and the confusion right after the blast.
Crowd members were there for one another. They're performing for
us to aid to each other. They were giving emotionals, support,
they were sharing Walter all before emergency services were able
to get into the building, the cards were already performing
(15:07):
amazing coordination to support one another, to match up children
with their families, for parents to look after kids, and
recommends that authorities and emergency personnel work with the crowd
instead of focusing on gaining control of it. The crowd
is often pretty good at taking care of itself. Did
(15:32):
you know that in the UK they call an intermission
an interval? I just found out myself two countries separated
by a common language. Man, Okay, this is radio, so
we gotta be quick about this. You've got, let's say,
eight seconds to visit the bathroom, get a refreshment, and
return to your seat, and we're all settled back in fantastic.
(16:02):
From up here on stage, you can see little ripples
of motion moving across an audience. Having been a performer
myself for most of my adult life, it's still fascinating
to me to watch all the varied ways that crowds move.
For example, I recently finished it tour opening for a
band called Thievery Corporation. Their stuff has big drumbeats, sitar,
(16:23):
kind of groovy vocals, and during our set, the motion
of their audience is so different than what I'm used
to seeing at my own gigs that at first it
was downright disorienting. Like is a hip hop artist, I'm
accustomed to staccato gestures fans with one arm up, beating
in time to the music, whereas this thievery crowd was
way way looser. After our first show together, my bandmate
(16:46):
Joshua described it as a kelp forest, This vast sea
of fluid, undulating bodies cipher sounds the very famous in
New York crowd whisperer sees the same thing when he's
up there in the DJ. Depending the type of music
and the type of party, you will see like like
ocean waves, Synchronized dancing or swaying is usually a great
(17:09):
sign for a performer, an indicator that the audience is
swept up in the same feeling. But sometimes movements sweeping
through a crowd can be dangerous. Let's welcome our next
guest to center stage. Will you introduce yourself to me
as you would have at a party? Oh? Right, at
a party, I would say, hi, a Marianna, I do physics,
(17:31):
and you would say, oh, physics. Oh I was so
bad in physics, buz no. But that's what everyone says
without realizing I also was very, very budding in physics.
Ariana Batanelli is an editor of the journal Communications Physics.
She's also an applied mathematician with a background in theoretical
(17:53):
physics and a passion for crowd movement and behavior. Under
certain conditions, the physical forces are crowd movement can overwhelm
the people in it. So if you have a little
bit of space in front of you and you all
want to get to the festivals as soon as possible,
as long as someone takes some little step forward, you
will take another step forward. And so at some point
(18:14):
the pressure builds up from the back to the front,
and in the front you see people basically start to
bobbling left and right. So there starts being some sort
of waves into the crowd where people can't really do
anything and being transport by the wave. And then in
that condition it can happen that like maybe two waves
(18:35):
crush or you get smashed into a wall and something
like that. And yeah, so that's pretty ugly. Okay, So
you focused a lot on crowd density and like high
density crowds, how many people and how tightly packed you
have to be to be identity. So there is six
seven people per square meters, six or seven people for
square met Okay, So for those of us who don't
(18:55):
think in meters, how far away am I from the
other people? Here's super squeezed by these people, Like you
wouldn't be able to fit seven person in a square
meter unless you have a box around the square meter,
like I'm tight, Like I can smell other people's wine
and stuff, like I'm I'm being touched. My body is touched.
H Yeah, definitely, the forces at play in these high
(19:20):
density crowds can get intense enough to seriously hurt people.
The disaster at the Astro World Festival in Houston, Texas
was a tragic case. And point and Templeton you might remember,
mentioned that at the Hajje, densities can reach a dozen
people per square meter. At the two fifteen pilgrimage, more
than two thousand people were killed in what's often called
(19:41):
a crowd crush. A crowd crush is basically when the
density it's so high that people can't move freely anymore.
Like sometimes those pressures are so high that people basically well,
they are compressed by the crowd until near lungs can't
expand anymore and you and you choke to death in
(20:04):
the middle of the crowd. It's it's quite horrible. Even
if nobody is pushing, nobody's trying to harm anybody. The
pressure can build. It's just a byproduct of the crowd
itself compressed way, way too tightly. The point is one
it's to dents. It's too late. These super tightly packed
(20:25):
crowds also increase risk of trampling. To try to avoid
these dangers, people like Ariana study the mechanics of dense crowds,
striving to understand the precise manner in which human bodies
crammed together. As it turns out, some of the answers
to their questions might be found in green silos. Let
me explain, Farmers, after harvesting their grain, store it in silos.
(20:49):
Retrieving this grain later, however, sometimes proves hazardous. Like if
you open the silo from the bottom trying to take
out those grains, then you have those like large scale reactions.
The grain and the silos can shift, compact and create
pressure waves that get crazy intense, and it can create
(21:10):
so much pressure that it basically breaks. The silo blows
my mind. I had no idea. So in some way,
it's like filling a stadium with people was compared to
filling a silo with grain. To make sure that we
don't smash the people or explode the silo A Researchers
have also discovered some useful mathematical parallels in studying coffee beans.
(21:34):
For example, in answering questions about evacuation planning, what is
the optimal size of a door in order for the
evacuation to be fast as possible, because like as with
coffee beans, like they can clog and people can clog.
And they found out that you can have an ob
stockhold if you put an obstacle in the right place
(21:56):
in front of the door. Actually, people have our force
to alternate. Counterintuitively, placing a carefully designed impediment in the
path of a crowd can keep foot traffic flowing, preventing
people from clogging exits. And even if you're not designing
evacuation routes, here's a bit of news you can use
from a high density crowd researcher. Think about how difficult
(22:17):
it can be to move through a pack concert, trying
to get out of the throng in the center of
the floor to go to the bathroom or make your
way to coat check. It involves a lot of mumbled apologies,
the risk of slashing beer on somebody's new kicks, and
a lot of low key body checking. But there is
a solution. If everyone is facing the stage, for example,
and you want to get out, you want to move
(22:39):
diagonally towards the stage to extract yourself from the crowd,
make your way towards one of the sidewalls while also
moving forward towards the stage a bit boom. First in
line at the restaurant. Look at you, Look at you.
Even though much of Ariana's research has focused on crowd
(22:59):
worst case scenarios, let the record show she's not always
all serious. I've been in a few more spits. Yeah, okay.
She also talks real casually about some concert phenomenon called
the Wall of Death. Like it's people running around because
at some point they decide that it's cool to run around,
or the wall of death. You ever seen any Excuse me,
(23:19):
I have no idea what you're talking about. At some
point someone screams the world death or whatever, and the
crowd separates into hols, and it's like then it becomes
like a medieval movie where they start running towards each
other and then they crash in the middle, like just smashing,
like two walls smashing through. Does everybody sorry, producers in
(23:41):
the room, do you guys know what this is. Everybody
knows what this is. I am not metal enough to
have witnessed a wall of death, but I do absolutely
know what it feels like to be moved by something
not quite tangible that circulates in a crowded room. It's
a mood, it's a buzz. It's like everyone there is
plugged into some shared circuit. Take comedy shows, for instance,
(24:04):
like the one Cipher hosts. Laughter is contagious. It's a
feeling that if the comedians good or the jokes are good,
they shot something into the air and everyone felt it
at the exact same time. It had an involuntary response.
It's like a crowd has emergent properties of its own.
There's a positive feedback loop as feelings and movements spread
(24:26):
and get amplified, like when a good DJ is spinning.
The audience performs for itself. The dancers work it, Strangers
make way for one another, mouth the words at each other.
It's like a tiny culture develops there in that one place,
a little society that lasts for only one night. And
I love when somebody just walks in and they immediately
(24:47):
start dancing, like they danced their way to the dance floor.
That's how you know you're killing it, because, like, the
music is always going to be the music. But what
they're feeling when they walk in is the vibe? Is
it a collective vibe? Is it a vibe that in
part is generated by the crowd? Oh? Absolutely, there's no
other way to create a vibe in that environment. You know,
(25:08):
the music is what they're hearing, and the vibe is
what they're feeling. I've spent a considerable portion of my
life chasing that feeling, that vibe, a tour from city
to city with my band, and every night on stage,
I try to say the right thing, or sing the
right song, or lift my arm into the light. It's
just the right moment so that a room full of
(25:30):
strangers will feel, for a while at least united, connected
enough to let down our defenses and allow ourselves to
be moved in one another's company and buy one another's company. Okay,
to the end, you guys, A final bow from our
(25:52):
guests and Templeton ganzer Ariana about a Nelly and of
course cipher sounds. You got room, Idessa have been your
host this evening. What James such a smart alec in
the booth James turn the clapping back on Thank You.
(26:15):
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public
media co production with I Heart Media, and it's hosted
by Messa. Find me online at Duessa on Instagram and
Dussa Darling on Twitter. Be at home Safe everybody caffeine, nicotine, alcohol.
(26:35):
Almost everyone in the world uses some sort of drug, drink,
and drugs have played a huge role not only in
our social lives, but in civic and sometimes religious life too.
Next time on deeply Human, I'm asking why do we
use intoxicans?
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