Crowd Safety Management Meets Crowd Psychology
By John Drury BA(Hons), MSc, PhD, Professor of Social Psychology, University of Sussex
Note: This article originally appears in the 2024 GCMA Field Guide to Crowds, which is available to all members as a free download. Learn more about membership.
Big Beach Boutique II was a music event which took place in Brighton, UK, in 2002. It is now legendary for ravers and crowd safety managers alike. Organizers expected a crowd of up to 60,000, but around 250,000 crowded onto the beach that day, as people travelled from all over the country. The media described the event as a ‘near-disaster’ and even an ‘apocalypse’: Emergency exit routes were blocked, the density of the crowd was dangerous, and some attendees climbed up the lighting rigs. 160 people suffered minor injuries, 11 were taken to hospital, and six were arrested. Certainly the safety staff, the emergency services, and the facilities were overwhelmed. And yet it wasn’t the disaster that some feared; and for many attendees it was an outstanding experience.
Big Beach Boutique II was exceptional in a number of ways, but it also has features in common with many live events. Therefore, it serves to illuminate some general processes in crowd psychology, crowd safety management, and the relation between the two. This is why I carried out a research study into the event -- interviewing and surveying participants, organizers and staff, and gathering statements people made at the time. This is also why the event features in my teaching and in the training I provide to professionals working in the live events industry.
CROWD BEHAVIOUR AND PSYCHOLOGY
What is the psychology of the crowd at live events? It’s sometimes assumed that the relevant psychology begins and ends with individual biases and heuristics. But biases, heuristics and indeed all cognitions and motivations operate through the prism of identity. What seems important, what we notice, is judged as a function of who ‘we’ are. And we each have multiple ‘we’s, or identities, corresponding to our multiple group memberships. For example, experiments show that when people who define themselves as rock music fans hear that the same victim of an accident described as an ingroup member (e.g., ‘music fan’) rather than an outgroup member (‘classical music fan’) they perceive risks to be higher.
Live events are crowd events, which not only makes particular identities salient, it also transforms attendees’ relationships with those around them. All of this means that the psychology we need to understand behaviour and experiences at live events is a crowd psychology. But not any old crowd psychology. The ‘mob mentality’ theory of Gustave Le Bon and others has long been discredited. Today, modern psychology understands crowd behaviour through the concept of social identity. Shared social identity enables people in a crowd spontaneously to act as one; it defines who we want to cooperative with; and it specifies norms providing common definitions of appropriate and desirable behaviour.
CROWD BEHAVIOUR AND UNDERLYING PROCESSES AT BIG BEACH BOUTIQUE II
Three features of the behaviour and experiences of the crowd at Big Beach Boutique II stood out and illustrate processes observed at live events more generally: creating atmosphere, experiences of crowdedness, and feeling safe.
Creating atmosphere
Those attending Big Beach Boutique II often talked passionately about the atmosphere: ‘the most amazing event I have ever been to. The living atmosphere was unlike anything I have ever witnessed’. Good atmosphere tends to be linked to positive emotion (joy, happiness etc.). And what are the key factors that contribute to a good atmosphere and the associated positive emotion? A short answer is social relations – in particular sharing identity with others at the event. At Big Beach Boutique II, many of attendees’ accounts of ‘positive atmosphere’ referred to friendliness and positive interaction with strangers.
But what about relations with staff and organizers? Another feature that contributed to the atmosphere at Big Beach Boutique II was partygoers’ sense that organizers had lost control: ‘the kind of spontaneity of it and the fact that it was so almost disorganised and you know snowballed into something much bigger than it was meant to be really added to the experience made it feel like it was a real one-off experience’. The link between the failure of control by the organizers and the sense of excitement was contrasted with the experience four years later, at Big Beach Boutique III. This was a ticketed event, which was much more securitized and commercialized. It was objectively much safer, but in the views of attendees it lacked the atmosphere that characterized the earlier event.
Experiences of crowdedness
While Big Beach Boutique II attracted many people who saw themselves as ravers or clubbers, an event as big as this also attracted people with a more casual interest in the music and who didn’t identify strongly with the dance crowd. This variability in levels of identification had consequences for people’s experiences of crowdedness. The Safety Manual for the event stated that the site was 50,605 metres2 in size, and therefore allowed for 0.5 metres2 per person in a standing crowd of 60,000. However, most estimates put the size of the crowd that day at around 250,000, giving only 0.2 metres2 of space per person. Prima facie, therefore, this was a very crowded event.
We found that people’s sense of identification with the crowd was linked to their feeling less crowded. As people reported greater levels of crowdedness, low identifiers found this less and less enjoyable, whereas high identifiers were not negatively affected and continued to enjoy the event. There is a ‘common sense’ view that people always seek ‘personal space’. But at live events committed fans will seek out and enjoy the most crowded parts. They see others’ presence as part of the atmosphere, not an invasion of their space.
Feeling safe and creating safety
Where there are high levels of identification with a crowd, people in a crowd event can feel safe at objectively unsafe levels of density (Hani). This was certainly the case at Big Beach Boutique II. Why do high identifiers feel so safe in these high-density contexts? Looking at the factors that are associated with these feelings of safety, it’s evident that relations with others in the crowd are again important. It’s not just the organizers’ perceived competence that makes attendees feel safe, but also attendees’ expected support and trust in other attendees -- their belief that others would help if needed. High density makes it difficult if not impossible to help those around you. But such impulses and efforts have been noted at well-known crowd crushing incidents, including the Who concert crush, Hillsborough, and Astroworld.
Indeed, in many emergency incidents, the expectation that others in the crowd will provide support is actually a realistic one. And it’s more likely to happen when there is shared social identity in the crowd. At Big Beach Boutique II, the crowd faced a number of dangers. As the tide came in people, density increased and some people became distressed. But the spontaneous mass evacuation from the beach was not panicked and competitive, but orderly and coordinated. Further examples of coordination were observed in the way the crowd managed more mundane dangers. Thus, people in the crowd formed circles to protect the privacy of women urinating, and used friendly interaction to regulate the drunken behaviour of some individuals when it was becoming annoying for those around them.
APPLICATION FOR EVENT PROFESSIONALS: WORKING WITH CROWD PSYCHOLOGY
At Big Beach Boutique II, both partygoers and some of the crowd safety staff said that the crowd saved the day. Indeed, the professionals often felt powerless to act as there were so few of them relative to the size of the crowd. However, this event also illustrates how crowd safety professionals can work with crowd psychology to contribute to safety. There are three recommendations here.
Know crowd psychology, know the social identity
The (mistaken) assumption that crowds tend naturally towards ‘panic’ and disorder rationalizes forms of crowd management (including withholding information and prioritizing coercion) that make anxiety, distress, and hostility in the crowd more likely, in a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. If crowd behaviour is rather based on a psychology of identity, then one of the first tasks for those working with the crowd is to get to know that identity. What are the values, aims and norms of the people attending? How do they define themselves? At Big Beach Boutique II, it was notable that the police officers on duty at the event had a much more difficult, even ‘traumatic’, experience than some of the other crowd safety professionals. To the police, the crowd seemed to be chaotic, hostile, disorderly, and dangerous. To those professionals more familiar with rave and clubbing culture, however, while the crowd’s behaviour did not fit societal norms, nevertheless the majority of people were friendly (‘loved up’), conforming to their own norms, and therefore had clear behavioural limits based on their shared identity. Knowing and understanding the crowd’s identity can enable event professionals to connect with the crowd and to work with it, rather than against it.
To enhance safety and atmosphere, become ingroup to the crowd
A key reason why members of a crowd cooperate with each other is because they share identity – they see each other as ingroup – even if they don’t know each other personally. Therefore, to get the crowd to cooperate with you (whether asking them to avoid the most crowded areas or advising them on the correct exit in an emergency), you need to become ingroup to the crowd. Sure, you are ‘the experts’, so in that sense you’re different from the crowd; but you can be seen as ‘our experts’ rather than ‘other’ to the crowd.
Being seen as ingroup to the crowd also matters for atmosphere. Why did attendees experience the loss of control by organizers at Big Beach Boutique II as exciting, and the increased safety measures at Big Beach Boutique III as detracting from that enjoyment? Because such safety procedures were felt to be an external imposition. Yet if safety measures are done ‘by us’ not ‘to us’ – and ideally developed by co-production -- they are no longer such an external imposition.
Work with not against group identities to enhance safety
There are lots of ways to ‘become ingroup’ to the crowd. Many of them are simple: badge yourself as ‘crowd safety’ rather than ‘security’; provide information attendees find useful; communicate in a friendly way; help attendees achieve their aims. All these create connections. But there may be limits to this. When the crowd don’t see you as ingroup, what will you do?
At Big Beach Boutique II, when people climbed up the lighting rig, it was no use the staff simply asking them to come down. And if the police had tried threats of coercion, most likely people would have disobeyed further, as the police were weak and the crowd was strong. But some of the safety personnel knew the crowd identity well enough to understand who would be influential with a safety message – who was the crowd ‘prototype’ or embodiment – the headline DJ Fatboy Slim. So staff asked him to ask people to get down from the lighting rigs. The people came down, the crowd cheered rather than expressed hostility -- and no one else climbed a lighting rig that night. In effect by involving the group protype a new safety norm had been established.
TAKE-AWAY
Crowd safety relevant behaviours and positive atmosphere in crowds are both related to social identity processes. Event professionals need to understand and work with the identity of the crowd at their event to manage crowd safety and enhance positive experience.
John Drury is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex. His research on collective behaviour in crowd events and mass emergencies has informed the training of stewards and crowd safety managers across UK and Europe, and informs the Civil Contingencies Secretariat’s National Risk Assessments. As part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, he participated in the UK government SAGE behavioural science subgroup SPI-B.