Baiting crowd
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Baiting crowd is a form of collective aggression; this is a situation where a group of individuals unify their aggression, while they may not even know each other, towards another individual or group.[1]
It is a typical situation where a person is about to jump from a high building while there are people standing below, whereas some people begin to shout that the person has to jump off.
Leon Mann (born 12 December 1937) is an Australian psychologist.[citation needed] He is currently Director of the Research Leadership Program and coordinator of the University of Melbourne's Mentoring Program for Research Leaders.[2]
In the late 20th century, Leon Mann became interested in the idea of deindividuation. More specifically, he wanted to investigate how aggression of a group of people towards another individual or group, could influence one’s own behaviour.[1] In the attempt to investigate this matter, Mann analysed 166 cases of suicide or suicide attempt, in which in 21 cases a crowd was involved. He wanted to find out when collective aggression towards an individual, who was about to commit suicide (e.g. encouraging to jump of a large building), would cause an outsider to join the baiting crowd in this process of deindividuation. In ten of these 21 cases several factors may have led to deindividuation where baiting occurred.[3]
He found out that when the crowd was small and during daytime, people would usually not shout that the person should jump. However, when the crowd was large and it was late at night it caused people to be anonymous, therefore they would more quickly shout that the person had to jump from the building.[1]
This is caused through deindividuation which is a process whereby people lose their sense of socialized individual identity and often show unsocialized and even antisocial behavior.[1] In this situation people often blur their normal behaviors, leading to an increase in impulsive and deviant behavior. One becomes less an individual and more part of the mass.
Deindividuation theory predicts that under the cover of anonymity, crowd members will be more aggressive than when identifiable. Emergent norm theory predicts that the most aggressive behavior will occur when an aggressive norm prevails in a crowd in which participants are identifiable to each other.
