Stephen Reicher on the psychology of crowds

The Life Scientific

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2018

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Stephen Reicher is a social psychologist at St Andrews University who has spent decades understanding how people behave when in a group. To do so, he's often had to immerse himself among the subjects of his studies, from the Bristol riots in 1980 to the millions of Hindu pilgrims who go to the Magh Mela. Stephen Reicher talks to Jim al-Khalili about the positive and the negative sides to a crowd and the role of a leader of a crowd. He explains how he gave up a place to read medicine, to the annoyance of his parents, to study psychology. Now, he says, his mother would be proud of him as he's publishing research on the health benefits of attending mass gatherings.

Transcript

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0:35.0	Hello, I'm Jim Alkalee and you're about to listen to the quite excellent
0:40.0	podcast of the Life Scientific in which I get top scientists to tell me how they got to where
0:46.1	they are today.
0:47.6	My guest today is someone who enjoys being in a crowd, for professional reasons. Stephen Reischia is a social psychologist who's
0:56.1	interested in studying how people behave when in a group. To do so he's often had to
1:01.2	immerse himself among the subjects of his studies from the Bristol riots in 1980
1:06.3	to the millions of Hindu pilgrims who go to the Marg Mela.
1:10.9	Some psychologists have said that we lose our identity when we're in a crowd or that we follow
1:16.8	charismatic leaders but as we'll hear Stephen Reysha has a different view. He studied at Bristol University in the 1970s
1:25.2	when social psychology was just taking off in the UK. Now he's a professor at St Andrews.
1:31.8	Today we're at the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead, where the theme is the one and the many.
	...

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