The Mob Made Me Do It? Identity, Agency, & Crowds in the Capitol Siege and BLM

• In Event: Extremist Violence in the U.S. and Abroad

Abstract

How do we determine individual responsibility in a mob? As political science struggles to come to grips with the January 6th siege of the Capitol building and security response to it, the field finds little recent work on crowds or crowd psychology. Analyses go from looking at the movements backing these actions to emphasizing individuals and their intentions (particularly for the Capitol siege). Others emphasize leaders’ statements as determining individual and crowd behavior. All these approaches are partial and cannot explain all actors or those who do not go with the crowd. While political science threw crowd analysis out with rejected breakdown theories of old, sociology, psychology, and even computer modeling have continued to examine the dynamics of large-scale gatherings. The findings are more nuanced and detailed, including agency while still acknowledging a larger crowd dynamic.
In this paper I present a comprehensive analysis of crowd dynamics that incorporates psychological, sociological, and modeling research on the individual’s relation to a crowd, agency, and the emotional contagion presumed to spread in a mob. This research is part of an on-going effort to model crowd-security force interactions using conclusions based in social scientific and experimental research.

Author

• Anne Marie Baylouny, Naval Postgraduate School