Adding a psychological dimension to mass gatherings medicine

Objectives. Mass gatherings pose distinctive challenges for medicine. One neglected aspect of this is that the behaviour of people participating in such events is different from the behaviour they exhibit in their everyday lives. This paper seeks to describe a Social Psychological perspective on the processes shaping people's behaviour at mass gatherings and to explore how these are relevant for an understanding of the processes impacting on infection transmission. Conclusions. It is inadequate to conceptualise mass gatherings as simply an aggregate of a large number of individuals. Rather, those present may conceptualise themselves in terms of a collective with a shared group identity. Thinking of oneself and others as members of a collective, changes one's behaviour. First, one behaves in terms of one's understanding of the norms associated with the group. Second, the relationships between group members become more trusting and supportive. Understanding these two behavioural changes is key to understanding how and why mass gathering participants may behave in ways that make them more or less vulnerable to infection transmission. Implications for health education interventions are discussed.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

From the 'fragile rationalist' to 'collective resilience':what human psychology has taught us about the COVID-19 pandemic and what the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us about human psychology

A successful response to the Covid-19 pandemic is dependent on changing human behaviour to limit proximal interactions with others. Accordingly, governments have introduced severe constraints upon freedoms to move and to mix. This has been accompanied by doubts as to whether the public would abide by these constraints. Such doubts are underpinned by a psychological model of individuals as fragile rationalists who have limited cognitive capacities, who panic under pressure and turn a crisis into a tragedy. Drawing on evidence from the UK, we show that this did not occur. Rather, the pandemic has illustrated the remarkable collective resilience of individuals when brought together as a community by the common experience of crisis. This is a crucial lesson for the future, because it underpins the importance of developing leadership and policies that enhance rather than weaken such emergent social identity.</p

Social identity and health at mass gatherings

The Prayag Magh Mela research was funded by the ESRC (UK) research grant ‘Collective participation and social identification: A study of the individual, interpersonal and collective dimensions of attendance at the Magh Mela’ (RES-062-23-1449).Identifying with a group can bring benefits to physical and psychological health. These benefits can be found with both small-scale and large-scale social groups. However, groups can also be associated with health risks: a distinct branch of medicine (‘Mass Gathering Medicine’) has evolved to address the health risks posed by participating in events characterized by large crowds. We argue that emphasizing either the positive or the negative health consequences of group life is one-sided: both positive and negative effects on health can occur (simultaneously). Moreover, both such effects can have their roots in the same social psychological transformations associated with a group-based social identification. Reviewing evidence from across a range of mass gatherings, we offer a conceptual analysis of such mixed effects. Our account shows i., how social identity analyses can enrich mass gatherings medicine, and ii., how social identity analyses of health can be enriched by examining mass gatherings.PostprintPeer reviewe

The instrumental use of group prototypicality judgments

Of bikers, teachers and Germans: Groups’ diverging views about their prototypicality. British Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 385–400] have shown that ingroup members often tend to judge the ingroup as more prototypical of the superordinate group than other subgroups. In this paper, we argue that, in addition to the motivational processes that have been posited to explain this phenomenon, prototypicality judgments may vary according to instrumental considerations. In particular, those who believe their ingroup interest to be undermined by remaining part of the common group will downplay ingroup’s prototypicality as a way to sustain their separatist position. In a first study (N = 63), we found that Scottish respondents who support Scottish independence judged the Scots to be less prototypical of Britain than the English, as compared with Scots who do not support independence. In a second study (N = 191), we manipulated the rhetorical context within which prototypicality judgments were made. Results showed that the pattern found in study 1 only applied when the issue of independence was made salient. When the issue of the importance of Scottish history in Britain was made salient, the opposite pattern appeared, i.e. supporters of independence judged the Scots more prototypical than the English compared to non-supporters. These results were also interpreted in instrumental terms. [author's abstract

COVID‐19 in context: why do people die in emergencies? It’s probably not because of collective psychology

Notions of psychological frailty have been evident in comments by journalists, politicians and others on public responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, there is the argument that collective selfishness, thoughtless behaviour, and over-reaction would make the effects of Covid-19 much worse. The same kinds of claims have been made previously in relation to other kinds of emergencies, such as fires, earthquakes and sinking ships. We argue that in these cases as well as in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, other factors are better explanations for fatalities -- namely under-reaction to threat, systemic factors, and mismanagement. Psychologizing disasters serves to distract from the real causes and thus from who might be held responsible. Far from being the problem, collective psychology in emergencies – including the solidarity and cooperation so commonly witnessed among survivors – is the solution, one that should be harnessed more effectively in policy and practice

A political psychology of the link between populist beliefs and compliance with COVID-19 containment measures

This paper addresses the relationship between populist beliefs and compliance with COVID-19 containment measures. We argue that an understanding of this issue depends upon developing a social/political psychology which addresses the impact of social groups and social relations upon behavior. More specifically we propose that populist beliefs are based on the notion that elite authorities are opposed to the people and hence not to be trusted by them which in turn reduces compliance with what they propose. Furthermore, we draw distinctions between different domains of compliance (getting vaccinated, social distancing and complying with “track and trace”) and different forms of authority (politicians and scientists). We argue that, whereas loss of trust in politicians only undermines engagement with forms of compliance which involve direct engagement with political authority (i.e., track and trace) loss of trust in scientists undermines the very belief that there is a pandemic and hence reduces all forms of compliance. We use a survey of 321 English and Welsh respondents to address these arguments. The data provide weak support for the hypothesis that populism has an effect on compliance through trust in politicians but only in the case of participating in track and trace. The data provide stronger support for the hypothesis that populism has an effect on all forms of compliance through trust in scientists, but only when scientists are perceived as part of the elite. Over all these results demonstrate that the ability to understand the complex relationships between populist beliefs and compliance depends on developing a social/political psychology of COVID-19 which is able to explain how human behavior is shaped by social identities and social relationships which, in turn, are shaped by political ideologies.Peer reviewe

Everyday citizenship:identity claims and their reception

Citizenship involves being able to speak and be heard as a member of the community. This can be a formal right (e.g., a right to vote). It can also be something experienced in everyday life. However, the criteria for being judged a fellow member of the community are multiple and accorded different weights by different people. Thus, although one may self-define alongside one’s fellows, the degree to which these others reciprocate depends on the weight they give to various membership criteria. This suggests we approach everyday community membership in terms of an identity claims-making process in which first, an individual claims membership through invoking certain criteria of belonging, and second, others evaluate that claim. Pursuing this logic we report three experiments investigating the reception of such identity-claims. Study 1 showed that in Scotland a claim to membership of the national ingroup was accepted more if couched in terms of place of birth and ancestry rather than just in terms of one’s subjective identification. Studies 2 and 3 showed that this differential acceptance mattered for the claimant’s ability to be heard as a community member. We discuss the implications of these studies for the conceptualization of community membership and the realization of everyday citizenship rights

Crowds and collective behaviour

The challenge for a psychology of crowds and collective behavior is to explain how large numbers of people are, spontaneously, able to act together in patterned and socially meaningful ways and, at the same time, how crowd events can bring about social and psychological change. Classical theories, which treat crowd psychology as pathological, deny any meaning to crowd action. More recent normative and rationalist models begin to explain the coherence of crowd action but are unable to explain how that links to broader social systems of meaning. In both cases, the explanatory impasse derives from an individualistic conception of selfhood that denies any social basis to behavioral control. Such a basis is provided by the social identity approach. This proposes that crowd formation is underpinned by the development of shared social identity whereby people see themselves and others in terms of membership of a common category. This leads to three psychological transformations: members perceive the world in terms of collective values and belief systems; they coordinate themselves effectively; and hence they are empowered to realize their collective goals. These transformations explain the social form of crowd action. At the same time, crowd events are intergroup phenomena. It is through the intergroup dynamics between the crowd and an out-group (typically the police)—more specifically the way the social position of crowd members can change through the way police officers understand and respond to their actions—that change can occur. The social identity framework helps make sense of a range of phenomena beyond conflict crowds, including behavior in emergencies and disasters and the psychology of mass gatherings. The practical adequacy of the social identity approach is demonstrated by its use in a number of applied fields, including “public order” policing, crowd and emergency management, mass gatherings, health, and pedestrian modeling