On Riots and Other Violent Acts

The ongoing threat of riots, violence and the imposition of curfew in Bangalore raises an interesting question: What triggers such a drastic different-from-normal behavior in so many people, either at the same time or spread over time in a copycat manner?

If you responded with the word “Politicians”, think again. After all, the risings in the Arab world a few years back, from Morocco to Libya; as well as the rising in the communist countries of eastern Europe (1989) were directed against politicians. Or think about the acts of Islamic terrorists who grew up in Europe, who seem to associate with groups far, far away.

Previous answers to this question in the context of riots, as Malcolm Gladwell points out, usually considered two options:

1)      “A crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants”.

2)     Or “maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs”.

Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter added another possible reason:

“A riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them.”

To simplify Granovetter’s theory: riots are started by people with a threshold of zero, i.e., with negligible provocation. They are joined by the set who will join in if at least one person is doing it. And then come the folks whose threshold is two. And so the mob builds up. And the next thing you know:

“A righteous upstanding citizen… could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.”

Now think about what that implies. As Gladwell says, it means that “rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group… starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen”.

And even more scarily, as Gladwell concludes:

“The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

If that’s indeed true, it explains a lot from all the way from Nazism to rioters to Islamic terrorists.