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Not Born Yesterday

Page 14

by Hugo Mercier


  contagion. Indeed, this perspective helps us understand why

  emotional expressions sometimes powerfully affect people, and

  sometimes have no effect whatsoever.

  In the vari ous cases of “mass psychogenic illness,” such as

  laughter epidemics, what clearly sets apart the contagion per-

  spective from the current adaptive view are the predictions

  regarding who the be hav iors spread to. Pathogens spread to

  whoever is most in contact with the infectious agent. If the con-

  w h at t o f e e l? 107

  tagion analogy were accurate, we should expect a similar pat-

  tern with emotional signals. By contrast, the adaptive perspective

  predicts that influence should be heavi ly constrained by the state

  of mind of those who perceived the signals, and by their relation-

  ship with those who send them. Supporting the emotional

  vigilance perspective, the abnormal be hav iors that characterize

  mass psychogenic illness rarely, if ever, spread outside a small

  coterie of people who know and trust each other. The symptoms

  typical y affect a few dozen people at most, all of them members

  of the same group— pupils in a school, workers in a factory,

  inhabitants of a small vil age.41 In con temporary cases of mass

  psychogenic illness, the area soon swarms with journalists, gov-

  ernment representatives, experts, and rubberneckers. None of

  them is ever affected. In most cases, only one gender or age- group

  is affected. In high schools, the weird be hav iors are communi-

  cated along the typical fault lines of teenage social life: cool kids

  who hang out together are affected first, fol owed later by less

  popu lar teens.42

  Whether or not an individual starts displaying bizarre be hav-

  iors is a function of their existing relationship with those who

  already exhibit the symptoms, but also of their prior mental

  states. Be hav iors that are truly harmful— vio lence toward others,

  serious self- harm—do not create mass psychogenic illnesses.

  Instead, we observe be hav iors such as dizziness, jerking move-

  ments, or laughing. Moreover, people affected by mass psycho-

  genic illnesses might derive some benefits. Those who experi-

  ence these symptoms are likely to have suffered unusual stress,

  and the symptoms might allow them either to get out of a bad

  situation or at least to attract attention to it. In Tanganyika, the

  outbreaks mostly affected children caught between their tradi-

  tional culture and that imposed by the nuns running their

  boarding schools. Factories affected by mass psychogenic

  108 ch ap t er 7

  illnesses tend to have particularly poor working conditions—

  and more people start exhibiting the symptoms when the pos-

  sibility of litigation and compensation emerges.43 For example,

  in the early 1980s, after a bizarre (but genuine) epidemic had

  taken over Spain, the government started offering compensa-

  tion to those affected. Among the patients who exhibited not

  physical but psychiatric symptoms, the compensations, psychia-

  trists noted, “introduced a certain mimicry into the symptom-

  atology,” with some people imitating (prob ably unconsciously)

  the symptoms of those deemed by their doctors eligible for

  compensation.44 By contrast with the weird be hav iors that char-

  acterize mass psychogenic illnesses, the spread of pathogens is

  quite insensitive to the amount of harm caused: finding it really

  incon ve nient to get the flu hardly prevents us from catching it.

  The pattern of mass psychogenic illnesses— who tends to be

  affected by them, after contact with whom—is thus much bet-

  ter explained by taking an adaptive stance, in which our reactions

  to others’ emotional displays are filtered by emotional vigilance,

  than by the contagion analogy. What about crowds, then? The

  answer here is simple. The view of crowds as passive herds sub-

  ject to currents of violent passions is simply wrong, with no basis

  in fact.45

  Rational Crowds

  The conventional reactionary narrative describes the French

  Revolution as a “dictatorship of a mob,” whose “proceedings,

  conforming to its nature, consist in acts of vio lence, wherever it

  finds re sis tance, it strikes.”46 Historian George Rudé restored the

  truth in The Crowd in the French Revolution.47 If more than a hun-

  dred people die when the Bastille is taken, nearly all of them are

  revolutionaries. Rudé even won ders why “the angry and trium-

  w h at t o f e e l? 109

  phant crowds” had been so restrained and had not killed more

  than a handful of guards. Two months later, the mob takes over

  Paris’s city hall. Citizens tear apart official documents but leave

  a huge pile of money sitting there untouched. In July 1791, a

  crowd fifty thousand strong marches on the Champ de Mars.

  They do so mostly peacefully, while the National Guard, called

  in to control them, kills dozens of protesters. Throughout the

  revolutionary years, mobs of women take over ware houses or

  shops sel ing sugar. Instead of looting them, the women ask for

  a discount. Most of the defenseless victims of the revolutionary

  crowds are the prisoners killed during the September Massacres,

  but this slaughter is neither completely irrational nor wholly in-

  discriminate. Paris is attacked from all sides by foreign powers;

  most able men, and all the weapons, are at the front, leaving the

  city eminently vulnerable to an attack from within. And many

  prisoners are spared, such as those whose only crime is to be in

  debt, as well as women.

  The strikers of the late nineteenth century, protesting their low

  wages and dangerous working conditions, scaring Le Bon, Tarde,

  and other crowd psychologists, were largely harmless. Out of

  twenty- seven hundred strikes, fewer than a hundred turned vio-

  lent, and the crowds killed a grand total of one person (a nasty

  supervisor already hated by the workers).48 The strikers were far

  more likely to be killed by guards and policemen than they were

  to kill anyone. The crowds’ tameness even led anarchists to com-

  plain about the strikers’ stupidity, citing crowd psychologists in

  support of their cause. Whether they are too violent or too tame,

  crowds are (wrongly) perceived as gullible.49

  These broadly rational and surprisingly restrained actions are

  hardly a specialty of French crowds.

  The peasants who revolted in fourteenth- century England

  took over manors, castles, and churches. Rather than wanton

  110 ch ap t er 7

  looting and kil ing, they were mostly content with burning the

  documents that held them in debt or bondage.50

  Historian Aoki Koji documented more than seven thousand

  cases of popu lar protest in Tokugawa Japan (the era extending

  from 1600 to 1868). Only 2 percent of these uprisings led to

  deaths among those targeted by the protests.51

  In 1786, thousands led by Daniel Shays took arms in the

  state of Mas sa chu setts against the economic and po liti cal order.

  This
insurrection, and others like it, terrified the framers of

  the U.S. Constitution.52 Yet these revolting crowds proved

  largely toothless: Shays’ Rebel ion did not cause a single casu-

  alty, and most rebels ended up signing confessions to be granted

  amnesty.

  In 1966, “spontaneous mobs” of Red Guards formed in the

  Chinese city of Wuhan.53 These crowds targeted the houses of

  twenty- one thousand “monsters and ghosts”— people who were

  believed to oppose the Cultural Revolution. No one dared op-

  pose the mobs, which could have killed at wil ; yet the Guards

  let 99.9 percent of their targets live.

  That people in crowds can do horrible things, from lynching

  to sexual assault, is undeniable. The point here isn’t to pass moral

  judgment on crowds and the individuals who constitute them,

  but to understand their dynamic. If crowds were truly animated

  by “contagious transports, irresistible currents of passion, epi-

  demics of credulity,” they should be much more consistently vio-

  lent, unable to show restraint, wholly irrational.54 Instead,

  crowds often eschew vio lence altogether or, failing this, consis-

  tently show discrimination in their actions, attacking specific

  targets and sparing others, using controlled strategies rather than

  all- out rampage.55 Even morally depraved attacks need not be

  irrational: some people are ready to seize any chance to steal and

  assault (often specific) others. Their actions are not driven by

  w h at t o f e e l? 111

  “irresistible currents of passions” but by the opportunity to act

  with relative impunity that crowds provide.56

  The same picture emerges when we look at cases of supposed

  panic.57 Some instances of panic are simply in ven ted—

  subsequent analyses showed that very few people panicked

  when they heard the infamous “War of the Worlds” radio pro-

  gram.58 Even real, terrifying events, such as natu ral disasters or

  air raids, do not cause widespread panic.59 Likewise, during war-

  fare, panic leading to “serious disor ga ni za tion . . . of combat

  units . . . was found to be exceedingly rare.”60 Instead of conta-

  gious panic we find in threatened crowds the same heterogene-

  ity as in any other crowd. Human factors researcher Guylène

  Proulx and her colleagues analyzed the accounts of survivors

  from the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, people who were

  in the World Trade Center towers when they were hit by jumbo

  jets.61 Mass panic, with every body rushing for the exit, would be

  an understandable reaction in these circumstances. Instead, less

  than a third of firsthand accounts described others as being “mo-

  mentarily panicked.” The majority of survivors thought others

  were calm, and a substantial minority were helpful. Guil aume

  Dezecache and his colleagues observed a similar pattern in the

  reaction of the victims of the attacks on the Bataclan in Paris.62

  Even as terrorists were targeting them with automatic weapons,

  those trapped in the theater performed more pro- social actions

  (comforting others, for instance) than antisocial actions. More-

  over, the antisocial actions— such as pushing others to get to

  the exit— were driven by rational (albeit selfish) factors, such

  as the possibility of escape, rather than sheer panic.

  The reactions of the survivors of the 9/11 and Bataclan attacks

  are no exception. In every emergency situation, a few people do

  react as if panicked— rushing for the exit, pushing anybody who

  is in their way. But panic is a misleading description, as it suggests

  112 ch ap t er 7

  that the be hav ior is irrational and easily transmitted. Instead,

  fleeing by any means available in the face of shots, fire, or other

  perceived threats, selfish as it might be, is hardly irrational. And

  the panic doesn’t spread: most people behave calmly enough,

  and many help others, in par tic u lar the most vulnerable.63

  The popu lar image of crowds, whether they are rioting or pan-

  icking, suffers from the “illusion of una nim ity,” an intuition that

  all crowd members are going to behave in the same way.64 Even

  when crowd members share an ideology, their be hav ior is het-

  erogeneous: they do not necessarily follow each other’s actions

  or the leader’s demands.65 If there are no “irresistible currents of

  passions,” crowd members do influence each other, but mostly

  within small groups: people who have joined the crowd together,

  who know each other wel , and who can more easily trust each

  other’s reactions.66 The only exception to this pattern is that of

  retreating soldiers. The less the soldiers know and trust each

  other, the more likely they are to emulate those who start flee-

  ing, leading to a full- scale rout. But this has nothing to do with

  emotional contagion. When soldiers infer, rightly enough, that

  they cannot trust others to hold the line, they try not to find

  themselves in that least enviable of positions: being the last one

  to flee.67

  Instead of indiscriminately catching what ever emotion we

  happen to witness, we exert emotional vigilance— even when we

  are in the middle of a crowd. For us to react to emotional signals

  in the way intended by their sender, the reaction has to suit our

  current plans and mental states, and the sender has to be some-

  one we like, who has not proven unreliable in the past, and

  whose emotion seems justified. Other wise, we might not react at

  all, or we might react in a way opposite to that intended— rejoicing

  in someone’s pain, or being angered by a display of anger.

  8

  DEMAGOGUES, PROPHETS,

  AND PREACHERS

  evolution makes gullibility maladaptive. So as not

  to be abused by senders of unreliable messages, we are endowed

  with a suite of cognitive mechanisms that help us decide how

  much weight to put on what we hear or read. To do so, these open

  vigilance mechanisms consider a number of cues: Are good ar-

  guments being offered? Is the source competent? Does the

  source have my interests at heart?

  When it comes to large audiences, for better or worse these

  cues do not scale up wel . Argumentation is most efficient in the

  context of a small group discussion, with its back- and- forth of

  arguments and counterarguments. When aiming a speech at mil-

  lions, speakers have to resort to common denominators, and

  they cannot anticipate the many objections that are certain to

  arise. Demonstrating competence to a wide audience is difficult:

  with limited knowledge and attention span, how are listeners

  supposed to know who is the most competent politician or econ-

  omist? Similarly, credibly displaying one’s goodwill is easier

  said than done, as building trust is best done slowly, one indi-

  vidual at a time.

  When our more sophisticated open vigilance mechanisms do

  not operate, we are left with plausibility checking. Plausibility

  checking is always on, ever vigilant. As a result, it should exert

  113
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  a disproportionate influence on mass persuasion, making it

  tremendously difficult to change people’s minds. At best, mass

  persuaders can hope to spread messages that conform with the

  public’s preexisting plans and beliefs. With a bit of work, they wil

  be able to affect their audience at the margin, on issues for which

  the audience is ambivalent or had weak opinions to start with.

  Yet many have granted prophets the power to convert whole

  crowds, propagandists the ability to subvert entire nations, cam-

  paigners the skill to direct electoral outcomes, and advertisers

  the capacity to turn us all into mindless consumerists. Could

  this be all wrong?

  Demagogues

  If ancient Athens is the blueprint for democracy, Cleon is a blue-

  print for democracy’s “worst enemies”: the demagogues.1 As

  described by politician Michael Signer, Cleon “took over the

  Athenian government, came within a hair of executing a power-

  ful playwright who dared challenge him, attempted the mass

  murder of the inhabitants of a vanquished island, launched reck-

  less military expeditions, and brought Athens into a war that

  ultimately would defeat its democracy for a time.”2 According to

  his critics, Cleon had become “very power ful with the multitude”

  thanks to his charisma, in par tic u lar his power ful voice, with

  which he harangued the Athenian demos.3 The power of dema-

  gogues such as Cleon is often taken to be the foremost illustra-

  tion of the gullibility of the masses.

  With hindsight, there is no doubt that some of Cleon’s choices

  were morally repugnant or strategically dubious. But the real

  question here is: Was Cleon able to use his charisma to talk the

  Athenians into making decisions that were good for him but bad

  for them?

  d e m a g o g ue s, p r o p he t s, p r e a c he r s 115

  The most infamous of the decisions attributed to Cleon is the

  order to wipe out the inhabitants of Mytelene in reprisal for re-

  volting against Athens, the archetypal example of a bloodthirsty

  demagogue driving the populace to evil deeds. But did Cleon

  really have to use his charismatic powers to persuade the Athe-

  nians to commit such an atrocity? It seems unlikely. Mytelene

  had betrayed Athens by conspiring with its enemy, Sparta.4 It had

 

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