Olympic torch meets protests in London

Thousands of people showed up last month to protest as the Olympic torch made its way through London. Angry at China’s poor human rights history and its suppression of the people of Tibet, the protesters saw the torch’s highly-publicized trip through London as the perfect opportunity to make their voices heard. They turned out first by the hundreds and soon by the thousands, many carrying signs or shouting derogatory chants directed at the Chinese government.

Some of the demonstrators rushed the torch, and at least one tried to grab it. Another tried to put out the torch’s flame with a fire extinguisher. At one point, a crowd of about a hundred people tried to surround the torch, forcing police to move the torch and torch bearer into a bus to complete the next leg of the trip. In all, 36 people were arrested by Metropolitan Police during the demonstrations.

While the Olympic torch has faced protests virtually everywhere it has gone, London’s demonstrations have been the most extensive so far. When examined from a social psychological perspective, massive demonstrations such as this one seem to make more sense.

In large groups, people tend to undergo deindividuation—the loss of self-awareness and individual accountability. Individuals lose their personal identity, and the group formulates one identity as a whole. This feeling of anonymity allows people’s inhibitions and sense of to self-regulation diminish. As a result, they feel no shame in behave in impulsive and destructive ways that they normally wouldn’t. The people within the crowd energize and feed off each other, furthering the mob mentality. Such a process can be seen to an extreme extent whenever violent rioting occurs. When the other members of a crowd are behaving destructively, there is little stopping a given person from joining in.

In a group of over a thousand protesters, it is easy to see why destructive behavior can take place. The diffusion of responsibility occurs—just imagine the feeling of being responsible for only 1/1000th of the damage that is incurred. As the quote goes, “Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.” So while it is doubtful that each of these protesters would have rushed the torch and tried to douse the flame on their own, they had no qualms about doing so when part of a huge crowd. In the case of the torch protests, little harm was actually done, but deindividuation can be dangerous when it occurs on a larger or more destructive scale.

Source: CNN.com, 4/6/08