Crowdedness Mediates the Effect of Social Identification on Positive Emotion in a Crowd: A Survey of Two Crowd Events

David Novelli,Stephen Reicher,Clifford Stott,John Drury,Kevin Paterson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078983

David Novelli, Stephen Reicher + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078983

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Abstract

Exposure to crowding is said to be aversive, yet people also seek out and enjoy crowded situations. We surveyed participants at two crowd events to test the prediction of self-categorization theory that variable emotional responses to crowding are a function of social identification with the crowd. In data collected from participants who attended a crowded outdoor music event (n = 48), identification with the crowd predicted feeling less crowded; and there was an indirect effect of identification with the crowd on positive emotion through feeling less crowded. Identification with the crowd also moderated the relation between feeling less crowded and positive emotion. In data collected at a demonstration march (n = 112), identification with the crowd predicted central (most dense) location in the crowd; and there was an indirect effect of identification with the crowd on positive emotion through central location in the crowd. Positive emotion in the crowd also increased over the duration of the crowd event. These findings are in line with the predictions of self-categorization theory. They are inconsistent with approaches that suggest that crowding is inherently aversive; and they cannot easily be explained through the concept of ‘personal space’.

Highlights

Exposure to crowding – that is, close physical proximity in a crowd – has been shown to be detrimental to human experience and wellbeing [1,2,3]
The more that participants identified, the more they positioned themselves in a central location; and a more central location in the crowd was associated with a more positive emotional response
The more that demonstrators identified with the demonstration crowd, the more they were in a central physical location within the crowd, and closer in physical proximity to their fellow crowd members in this relatively crowded location

Summary

Introduction

Exposure to crowding – that is, close physical proximity in a crowd – has been shown to be detrimental to human experience and wellbeing [1,2,3]. Most notable of the attempts to explain variable responses to crowding is the concept of ‘personal space’ [10,11,12] This approach suggests that, when a perceiver feels that their zone of ‘personal space’ is intruded upon, they will experience negative arousal which they attribute to the physical encroachment of the other people present. The strength of this approach as an account of variable responses to crowding is that it considers the physical and social relations between the perceiver and the others copresent in the crowd, rather than focussing on individual personality variations [4] or on complex interactions between several intervening factors [13]

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