The Crowd: Zooming in on Social Behaviour

ABSTRACT

The direct observation of social behaviour has almost completely vanished from socialpsychological research, in favour of studies of attitudes, identities and cognitions. Using crowd psychology as an illustration, this article argues for a renewed focus on observational research enabled by recent technological advances, including high‐resolution video, motion tracking, eye tracking and large‐scale crowd experiments. We review the historical development of crowd research in social psychology, sociology and physics, highlighting how dominant theories have focused on exceptional phenomena, such as riots, panic and crowd violence whilst relying heavily on self‐reports and retrospective accounts. Using recent observational research as an example, the article shows that everyday crowds are characterised by substantial behavioural heterogeneity, limited contagion effects and highly coordinated collective behaviour. These findings challenge established social psychological crowd theories, thereby demonstrating that using these methods is very worthwhile. We conclude that interdisciplinary observational approaches offer powerful opportunities for social psychology to study real‐world social interaction and to develop theories that better account for spatial, material and dynamic social processes.