Stuff You Should Know - How Crowds Work

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

If you’ve ever been out of your house you’ve probably been in a crowd before. They can be as mundane as an elevator full of people or as consequential as a mass of protesters. But did you know there’s psychology to crowds? And they follow fluid dynamics?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeart Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry. And you squeeze us together in a one meter square space. We're still doing pretty good on stuff you should know. You know what's funny is I was reading, and we'll get to it. But when things start to become problematic as far as people per square meter.

And I started to panic. Oh, really? Yeah. That didn't get me, but it occurred to me that some people listening to this are going to feel that way, too. Yeah, because we're talking about crowds. And if even the discussion of being in very close proximity to someone else triggers you, then consider this your warning. Yeah. Great job, Chuck. Yeah, sure. So we are talking crowds today, Chuck. You spoiled the entire episode by mentioning

that. I'm just kidding, buddy. And generally you think of this huge mass of people, say like at a concert or something like that or a show if you're into indie bands. But it can be any assemblage of people, any group of people. I'm guessing more than two, if that old adage is correct, about three being a crowd. But it can be anything from a bunch of people in an elevator to a bunch of people going to Mecca, flocking to Mecca for the Hodge on any given year.

Yeah, I think, like, technically just any grouping. Who put this one together, by the way, initially? This was a Julia joint, and thank you for reminding me. Before we go further, Kimberly from the prison labor listener mail is the person who got this one going. So thanks, Kimberly. Okay, yeah, thanks, big time, because I thought this was super interesting. But, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Julia did some research and basically came back with this.

a crowd is any group of people temporarily gathered in the same physical space relatively close to each other. Elevators? Sure. I mean, it's a little surprising if you think about it. For some reason, I got hooked on the elevator thing, but there's a lot of different reasons those people could be together. They're all going to different floors in the same building, say if they happen to be on an elevator. Or they could all have a shared interest. They're all at a gun show.

or they have a shared goal. They're trying to overthrow their regime, their ruling regime. There's all sorts of different reasons people come together in crowds. Sometimes it's on purpose. Sometimes it's not planned by that person. But it just happens. And one of the cool things is we've been studying crowds through all sorts of different lenses. And we've kind of whittled down to the fact that humans are essentially innately good at navigating crowds

for the most part. Yeah. You know, some of the stuff Julia came back with was fairly, like you might be a little scared of crowds.

But it is good to know that that is sort of outdated thinking and why we will talk about bad things that can happen in crowds, the modern understanding of crowds, you're right, is that people are generally

pretty orderly, even in the face of disaster. And the things that make a crowd go bad, a lot of times it's not the crowd's fault. Yeah, they get blamed by authorities very frequently in retrospect. And then in further retrospect, it turns out like, no, actually, the authorities are probably at fault in this case.

Yeah. I mean, it's almost as if sometimes a peaceful protest can turn bad when an armed military shows up. Right, just the presence of that. Just the presence. And then other things that happen after. Right. So, yes.

And we'll talk about that for sure because there is a huge role for law enforcement in dealing with crowds. Like it's part of their job. Sure. They say crowd control, but that's apparently an outdated term as well. But dealing with crowds, managing crowds. So that's part of their job. That's not going to go away. We don't really want it to go away.

Instead, we want law enforcement to do it using the best practices that have been proven over and over again that cut down the chance of a crowd turning ugly. by huge percentages. Yeah, but, you know, one thing is for sure, like, people behave differently in crowds, and sometimes it's great. You know, I never, I never dance like this, man, but I'm at Burning Man and look at me all of a sudden. Right.

Or it can turn bad, and we're going to cover all angles. Well, let's talk about some of the bad ones, because there are some famous ones. This happens, you don't want to say a lot, but it's one of those things like a plane crash where it seems like it will have. happen all the time because it's just so shocking the details of it. Whenever it does happen, it seems like it happens way more frequently. That's just not the case. But when it does happen,

like I said, it can be pretty bad. Yeah, you know, because people can get trampled. People can be squashed by force. Like in a crowd rush, pressure can reach 1,000 pounds of force, which is a lot. Yeah. That can lead to loss of life. Notably, like you said, we're going to mention a handful, but the Astro World Festival in Houston, very sadly, in 2021, the Travis Scott performance, 10 people lost their lives and many more were injured. Yeah, there was one I hadn't heard of that was pretty bad, quite bad. It happened at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in Moscow in 1896. Yeah.

There was a crowd of half a million people who were all there for the coronation, and they knew that they were giving out free souvenirs, essentially. I saw half a pound of sausage, bags of nuts. A souvenir cup. And apparently they had enough for everybody, but a rumor spread in the crowd that they didn't have enough for everybody. And so the people in the back started pushing. The stampede broke out and 1,300 people died. Yeah.

Feels like concerts and sporting events. It can be dozens of people, which is all incredibly sad. But when people in the order of thousands are dying from an event, that's pretty striking. And that really follows the model, it seems like, for loss of life in crowd crush. There's some sort of bottleneck toward the front, and it's wider in back, so people in back start pushing, and the people in front can't go forward, so they get crushed. That seems to be like the case. That's what happened in Astro World. That's what happened in Moscow.

That's what happened in Duesburg, Germany, at the world's largest techno festival, the love parade. Yeah, I remember that. 2010, 21 people died, and it was a tunnel in that case. Yeah. It also happened. I mentioned the Hajj, and 2,000 people died at the Hajj, as part of that annual pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are required to do at least once in their lifetime. Well, they have like on the order of one and a half million people, up to two million people every year do this thing. And in 2015, 2,000 people died because there was a bottleneck, people pushed from the back. And that actually broke the previous record of the most people killed in a crowd crush that was also at the Hajj this time in 1990. Yeah, super, super sad. Because of all these tragedies, people have been studying how people move through crowds, crowd dynamics.

It's, you know, they use a lot of different sciences. Physics definitely is one, and we're going to talk about all these, but also physiology, psychology, certainly. And what they're looking at is human behavior, how people behave when they get in a crowd, because it changes once you have sort of a veil of anonymity going on. And again, it can be good or bad. But they use this in all kinds of modeling, whether it's, you know, in city planning or certainly event preparation, disaster management, crowd management, all kinds of people, like we'll pay people a lot of money to study and give their findings.

And you mentioned applying the principles of physics to studying. this. I think that started in the 50s, and it's not like tip for tat, but the movement and the formation of crowds resembles it so much that you can basically use physics terms like orbital motion or oscillators to basically describe how people behave in a crowd and how crowds behave themselves. One of the ways of looking at is systems theory, and complex adapted systems are what crowds do. It's chaotic at first, but then they start to move together as a whole. Lines of communication develop without speech. It's just kind of like the crowd learns through feedback, and it just starts, it becomes a cohesive whole rather than just a bunch of people together into space.

Yeah, I mean, certainly fluid dynamics is a factor, and they kind of use some of that terminology as well when talking about crowds. Because if you're fluid, like let's say you're a liquid. or even a gas. The particles are really tightly packed, but they're never actually colliding because they have electrons repelling each other. We do a similar thing, but it's called what's known as social force.

It's that thing when you're in a crowd and you just unconsciously, instinctively navigate without like constantly bumping into other people, at least if you're doing it right. Right. I've been in crowds where people are a little more unaware and there may be reasons for that. So I'm not like casting aspersions, but generally speaking, your body is just automatically adjusting because you want that path of least resistance.

You don't want to be banging into people all around you. And even in great crowds, like a huge, excited stadium after a big sports win or after a big energetic concert or something, you still find your way out of there. Generally, you know, not making contact with other people. slight, you know, bumps here and there, but unless someone really has their head up their butt or they're super drunk or there may be other, you know, some genuine factor they can't help, they're not just banging right into people constantly. Yeah. That made me wonder if it's electrons repelling each other that keeps liquids from bumping into one

another. I wonder if the collective group of electrons in our bodies are what makes us inherently, makes us inherently avoid it and almost have a six sense for that. kind of thing. I like that, Eddie. It's like the quantum explanation of swerving. Yeah, a little hippie-dippy. So there are a couple things that we figured out about crowds that the way that they behave is, again, this is spontaneous. I don't even know if we've said it, so maybe not again. It's spontaneous. It's unconscious typically, and it's collective, right? So we're actually moving cooperatively with other people, whether we realize it or not. We think we're just trying to make it

to the exit because we want to get to our car first so we can get the heck out of the parking lot as soon as possible. But we're actually unconsciously moving in conjunction with other people. One of the really great ways that that expresses itself is in lane formation, which is, well, it's exactly what it sounds like, right? Yeah, it's people kind of gathering and moving in one direction together, forming a lane. no one's taking the lead and saying everyone, this is the United States. So we generally walk down the right side of the hallway or the corridor

and other people on the left. That is something when I've traveled abroad. I had to get used to because I didn't realize the rules of the road typically apply to moving around the world as well. So I didn't know that until I went over to England for the first time and was bumping into people constantly. But yeah, here in the United States is generally right-side. left side. Or I guess it doesn't explain it well, but you did. You move along the right side of a hallway.

Sure. And that's just a difference in the electron spin of people in Europe and the people in the U.S. Oh, man. I also mentioned orbital motion too, right? So apparently in a crowd, people moving in the same direction, or if you're in a crowd that's just basically in one place, I think they studied the festival of the running of the Bulls in Pamplona to get this information. you basically move in a circle, in an orbit is what they call it, and you complete this orbit in about 18 seconds. And when I was reading this, I'm like, that's just not true. And then I went and watched video of this study. And yes, people just move around in a tight circle.

Basically, you're moving because other people are moving, but you're ultimately keeping your same space, this one orbital circle, which is pretty awesome. I mean, to be clear, because that sounded slightly confusing. Oh. People are not walking in a tight circle. You're just moving your body within a circular space. Right.

Like maybe raising your elbow to scratch your head or something like that. Right. So imagine the person in front of you. Imagine the person in front of you is backing up, so you back up, and then you maybe move to the right. And then they move this way, and you kind of come forward to your left. And then you kind of back up. a little bit to your left and then you back up center, like that. So you're facing the same way the whole time, but you're just shuffling your feet.

In the way that you're doing this, you're ultimately creating an orbit. Yeah. And I think that also applies to just taking up your personal space with general body movement. Yes, the electrons. So this works out pretty great, this idea of social force. It seems to work pretty well, and even in big crowds, when it starts to get a little more highly dense, when it's a problem. And this is where you might get triggered like I was.

And I don't even mind crowds. But when it started talking and getting like denser and denser, I just found myself getting a little, you know, my breathing sort of increased. Yeah. So at two people per square meter, a crowd moves a little slower because you're still trying to, you know,

get that distance between you and your friend next to you. Four people, you're going to start to bump around a little bit. At six people, things get truly difficult. and at 10 people per square meter, and I measured that out on the floor, that made me panic a little bit. That means individual movement is basically impossible

and the likelihood of, like, in a big crowd that's that dense, something bad is likely to happen. Yeah, this is the point where you can't raise your arms. They're at your side. If a crush starts to happen, you can't breathe. So you can die of asphyxiation. There is a very famous tragedy in 2022 in Seoul, the Taiwan tragedy, where kids in their 20s, healthy kids in their 20s, died of heart attacks

because they asphyxiated and their heart stopped because of a crowd crush. Yeah, and if you're wondering what this all looks like, we didn't do Big Macs, should have done Big Macs, but six people per square meter where, you know, it's not tragic, but movement is difficult, that's about 1,700 people. packed onto a tennis court. Yep. So that's a lot. Yeah, and that was at six.

We're talking 10 is when you can really be in trouble. Now, that is not guaranteed that something's going to go wrong. In Taiwan, there were, like, this situation was going on for an hour or so before it turned problematic. So as long as the people in the back are doing good and not pushing, as long as somebody in the center doesn't, faint and fall over or trip and fall down, this can work. It's not inherently going to be deadly, but the chances of it becoming dead. It's just sitting there balancing on the razor's edge at that point. It's a really dangerous place to be. Yeah, it's that one triggering incident is when it can really go south there. Yeah, for sure. Scary. Shall we take a break? Yes. All right,

we'll be right back with more crowds. You should know. Stop you should. Stop you should. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict? A villain. A nurse named Lucy Leppie.

Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt the case of Lucy Lettby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived in, to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong.

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I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets.

Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the Eyeheart, Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rows rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here.

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of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we covered partially covered physics. We should talk a little bit about psychology because crowds have their own distinct psychology around them as well. And people can behave in ways that they don't normally behave in a crowd just because of that psychology.

And early on, the explanation for that was like if there's a violent crowd, you know, then it was just full of violent people. Right. And there was a French psychologist named Gustave Lebon in 1895 who wrote the literal book on this, like the first one, called The Crowd, Colon, a study of the popular mind. And it was very influential, but this is one of those that's a little outdated in a lot of ways. Yeah, it's right in some ways, but his whole thing was like you have any crowd together. they're inherently mindless.

They form a collective mind. They become capable of anything. They're very suggestible. They're going to kill everybody in their path. Right. And like there are crowds that have done that before. But that's not the inherent, I guess, trait of crowds. Like crowds are actually the opposite.

They're actually way more peaceful and pro-social than that. But LeBahn essentially set the view of crowds that's still persistent today in a lot of quarters. And he did, yeah, he just had a huge impact on this. Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the different explanations over the years of like this collective behavior, because collective behavior is definitely happening. Yeah. There are a few different theories. One is a contagion theory, and that was put forth by LeBahn himself, which is that this irrational behavior that happen in a crowd spreads like a virus. Yeah. That can happen. And it's a lot. And it's also can't. So I'm sort of 50-50 on that one. Yeah. Again, like all of this stuff makes sense. It's just not like this is the most salacious, rare version of crowds, right? Yeah. You can also make the case like good positive behavior can be contagious in a crowd as well. Because like you said, people behave differently in crowds. That's just a fact. Yeah, like that dancing at Burning Man. Yeah, exactly. There's also convergence theory, which also makes a bit of sense that it.

explains why crowds have a collective mind. And it just basically says that's because crowds are made up of similar people. Like, usually there's not a lot of crowd-like mindless, say, behavior on an elevator because everybody there didn't come together on the elevator to protest something. But if you have a protest, there's way more potential for collective mind behavior because there's people who are there for the same reason. So they're sharing kind of a wavelength already when they get there. Yeah. If you're at that concert together, you're there because you want to see Bob Dylan in person. All right. You're all there for the same reason. Sure. Or you want to hear David Crosby harang you. Oh, man. He will too. Or he would have. He did. Oh, yeah. Okay. So that's convergence.

There's also group mind theory. Just a little on the nose. It's basically saying, like, you lose your individual identity and it's replaced as a part, a cog of this large, group's identity. Yeah. Yeah, again, like this is, yeah, it's not, it's not totally off. Social identity theory seems to be the prevalent dominant view of, I guess, kind of de-individuation in crowds.

Yeah, that's where you just, you're acting like everyone else is acting because you just want to fit in. Yeah, but you can't really put it better than that. So how do you become a crowd member? There are a few key concepts there. First, you have to get training. Go to school. Got to go to crowd school.

Right. And the first thing you need in crowd school is a lot of people in a very tight spot. It's called panic school. What are you feeling right now, by the way? I'm okay. And it's weird because I don't have like, what's it called? Clostrophobia necessarily. Uh-huh.

I think it's more for me just like I can't wait to get out of that crowd because I just want to have a little space. Maybe I do have a little claustrophobia. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it, but I think everybody does to a degree. It's just a threshold, you know? Yeah, but I've never, you know, I can accept hugs and I was never one of those kids like under the dog pile that was like freaking out or anything like that. Oh, yeah, I did not like that. Yeah, well, you have a little claustrophobia, right? Yeah, a little bit.

I've kind of outgrown it a lot. But, yeah, if you put me in like a sewer culvert or hearing about like a caving accident. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'll start. Yeah, I can't handle that. Well, maybe you have a fear of dying. That could be it. That might be what's going on.

It could be it. Which is rational. But what are we talking about? We're talking about the three key concepts that form these foundations of collected behavior. And they are de-oh, man, de-individuation. Yeah. Emotional contagion. What?

And suggestibility. And that first one, de-individuation. individuation is basically like kind of what you were hinting at earlier is there's this new social identity and your individual identity is taking a break. Yeah, and this is a good example of how this stuff can kind of make sense, but it's also like you really just paid attention to the worst part of it. Right. And this came from Philip Zimbardo.

Remember him from the Stanford Prison Experiment? Oh, yeah. It was all about de-individuation. So he focused some work on crowds. Essentially, what he said is that, yeah, you just basically leave your own identity at the door. You take on a new identity of crowd member, group member. And basically, whatever the group's up for, you're up for too. You feel anonymous.

You feel unidentified. You also feel connected to those other people. And so if those other people start, you know, looting or something like that, you would probably never loot by yourself. Right. But since you're in that group, you've lost your individual identity that would prevent you from looting. Now it's like, well, yeah, I mean, I'm part of this group and we're looting, so let's get to it. I think that's fascinating. And I think that is so true and happens all the time.

And we've seen it all across, like I feel like in recent years, especially with various protests and, you know, things that people might call riots, things that people might call insurrections, where people that normally. wouldn't behave in a certain way. Like, hey, I was going down to the Capitol building to voice my opinion about how this country is being run. And next thing, you know, I'm beating a cop down with a flagpole. And normally I would not do something like that. Exactly. That's a great example of that. On the other side of it, you might never dance with your shirt out wearing nothing but a loin cloth. Burning Man. Yes. But in a different situation, you could be having just one of the greatest moments of your life. Totally.

And that's not just the ecstasy speaking, friend. That is you being a part of a crowd and feeling that kind of exhilaration of being part, you're connected to something larger than yourself. So it's the same thing. In a sense, you're de-individuated one way or another. It's just how is it going? Is it going positive? Is it going negative?

Or is it even neutral? Yeah. Yeah. I think this is all just very fascinating. The second one we mentioned was emotional contagion. And that is just the fact that, you know, emotions in a crowd are heightened anyway. If you're there at that concert or that protest, you're highly emotional probably for whatever reason you're there. Yeah.

Or if your team just won the big game and you're leaving in a big crowd. So you're aware of the people around you. But that, like, one person, like, and you've seen it before in any of those circumstances where one person again triggers something because they're extra emo, and all of a sudden everyone rises to meet that level of emotion. Yeah, one thing I saw, though, I think it's part of social identity theory is that that depends on the mood of the group or the norms of the group. So if it's like a group that is generally saying, like, we're a peaceful protest, somebody can come up and throw a Molotov cocktail and everybody else in the group's going to look at them, like, what the heck are you doing?

Yeah, totally. They will isolate that person, ostracize that person, and continue on with their peaceful protest. But if the norm of the group is like, yeah, we're being like repressed here and somebody throws a Molotov cocktail, there's a good chance that that crowd will change its norms to include throwing Molotov cocktails and more people will join in. Yeah, I mean, you used to hang out in a mosh pit or two back in the day, I'm sure, right? Yeah. Here and there. The mosh pit, I mean, I think they could be, and they probably have been studied within the crowd dynamics because it's sort of just a microcosm. but I remember in those days, and I wasn't like, oh, man, I can't wait to get in that mosh pit.

But if one broke out around me, I would find myself in it, like having a good time. Yeah. And the same thing would happen. I was in mosh pits where there was one jerk throwing elbows. Yeah. And everyone's like, get out of here, dude. Yeah. And then I've been in others where all of a sudden that one dude triggered another dude.

And then all of a sudden it got a little scary in there. And that's when Chuck took a walk. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. And then also there's often. and that jerk that's like not even in the pit, he just pushes people in who weren't planning on joining? Yeah, that should be a choice.

That guy needs to soak his head. Yeah, I had a quick story here about the first Lalo Pluze, the one with the Beastie Boys. And at Lakewood Amphitheater, big outdoor amphitheater on the lawn, the Mosh pit behind us, I wasn't in this one, but it got so big. How big was it? It was about a third of the size of an amphitheater lawn. Wow.

And it was swirling in the circle, and people started throwing up their cups and stuff and the trash around them. And that stuff formed a whirlpool, a tunnel of trash. Wow. As if a tornado was taking it up. That's amazing. Or at least, that's what I saw. That's a world-class mosh pit right there. It was, I've never seen anything like it.

And I've been around a lot of big shows like that, and I'd never seen anything like that. That's like that part from American Beauty where the kid sees the plastic bag caught up in the little whirlwinds. Like, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Yeah. I used to think that was the best movie ever. I don't think it's aged well. Not just because of Spacey.

Not just because of Spacey. The whole thing is kind of corny to me now. Yeah. Well, I'm not going to watch it again then. Yeah. Okay, there's one more, I guess, key aspect that you mentioned, too, which is suggestibility. Mm-hmm.

And this is, I think, another Laban thing, who, by the way, as far as I can tell, is not related to Simon Labon. That'd be great. Yeah. But LeBond basically was like they're de-individuated. They are basically capable of anything. And if there's, like, you could tell them whatever and they'll go do it. This definitely, I mean, just from recent experience, like, this can happen.

But it requires typically a central leader or organizer that people are looking to, a charismatic. speaker, somebody who can actually tap into that collective mind and push it one direction or another. That is possible. But again, that is fairly rare when something like that happens. But it is possible. It does happen sometimes. Well, I mean, I don't think we mentioned earlier, Hitler and Mussolini both studied the works

of LeBahn. Yeah. And I mean, like, they mobilized it to their own ends. They used it to generate nationalism and xenophobia. and essentially create like their own fascist states because it does work if you do it right and you have a crowd in the right mindset. That's right.

That's nuts, dude. Should we break or keep going? I say we... All right, we can break. You have my permission. You have my permission. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.

Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Leppie. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived in, to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong.

Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast.

I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final Rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines.

It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search for it.

This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the great things, Chuck, about studying crowds

is that you can figure out what makes crowds do what. And they have in a lot of ways, not just how they behave like physics or what the psychology is behind crowds, but like what triggers crowds to say change their mood? Because remember I said, like, depending on the norms, like they may or may not behave violently or unlawfully, and that can change with the same crowd,

depending on the circumstances. And one of the, like a good example of that is that if you have been, if you're a law enforcement officer and you're there and you basically, your whole squad is like, it's a protest. So of course they're going to turn violent and they're going to throw rocks at us and stuff like that. Just being primed to believe that actually makes it more likely that the crowd will behave that way. It's not like we have it reversed.

And so like you said, just, like you said, just the presence of a law enforcement, like, group or force in riot gear makes it more likely that a crowd will turn violent. Yeah, for sure. They have this new, I don't know how widespread it is yet, but one of the newer developments in this kind of, quote-unquote, crowd control is something called a dialogue team. Yeah. And that's when you get your nicest cop, I guess. Yeah. And make them the public-facing, uh, face of that unit and they put them out in the lead and they communicate their purpose there, their presence there, how they'd like things to go. And it's, and apparently it works a lot better

than just showing up and standing there, beating that billy club into your hand and staring down at people in all your heavy gear. Apparently it has quite a great calming effect on crowds and can even see the police presence as a little more benevolent and cause the crowd to, maybe self-belice a little more. Yeah, yeah. So the chances of the crowd turning ugly is way decreased when you have that kind of, like you said, public-facing kind of law enforcement. Yeah.

Like you still have the riot gear. You may even still have a line of guys with assault rifles with rubber bullets and there's like the MRAP, like off in the distance. But it's not, that's not what you have up against the crowd. You have friendly officers that are. explaining that they're there to protect your First Amendment rights, but also keep you safe. And yeah, like you said, self-policing, getting a crowd to police itself is, I mean, that's just the pinnacle of crowd control.

Totally. And it isn't very widespread here, but it's a model that Europe as a whole has adopted since the early 2000s, the aughts. Yeah. And so it's starting to spread over here, but it feels like it's more being, it's being handed over from Europe to the academics in America who are trying to give it to law enforcement in America to take and run with. Yeah. And the key to any, you know, regardless of the dialogue team out in front, the key to any sort of peaceful situation in a protest and

dealing with cops, is these cops have to be trained, like super trained. Training is the key to every officer interaction that they take. And most of these, you know, these big tragedies that you can point to, and not just in protest, but just any kind of these crushing tragedies, is the result of untrained officers in a lot of cases. Yeah, sometimes even the people who are in charge of all of the police there might not be trained in what they're doing. Like the Sheffield tragedy in, I think, in 1989, the police were blamed for that, although the police initially blamed soccer hooligans.

And it was like, no, the cops who were in charge of this had. no reason to be in charge of this. They had no training whatsoever. So that is a huge one for sure. A couple of sociologists came along to do a lot of the sort of official refutation of Le Bonn in the 20th century. And was the Italian guy you mentioned, this guy? Enrico? Did I mention an Italian guy?

I thought you mentioned an Italian guy. But regardless, whether he's showing up for the first time or the second. Okay. a guy named Enrico Quarantelli, he looked at a lot of emergency evacuations and studied them, and he basically came to the conclusion that usually people flee from these things, obviously because it's the sensible thing to do, but it's not necessarily a panicked, irrational group of people. They do so generally in an orderly fashion.

Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about emergency identity, because one of the ways that crowds kind of create like a different way of thinking is, let's say you have a group of people on a subway and the subway like is running normally. They are just a group of strangers trying not to make eye contact with one another on their way home, on their way to work, on their way wherever. They have no affiliation with one another aside from the fact that they're currently sharing space with one another. If that subway breaks down, those strangers become a group almost instantly. once they realize, okay, we're stuck.

The human tendency that recent scholarship has found is to come together as a group, help one another, start to actually care what happens to every other member of the group, trust one another, treat one another with respect, and that that happens in disaster after disaster after disaster or subway breakdown after subway breakdown. There was another sociologist.

I don't have his name, but he studied like 180 different, peacetime disasters and basically found, yeah, there's jerks in every crowd, but for the most part, they are the vast majority of people act pro-socialally and positively to come together as a group in the face of a disaster. Yeah, that was Charles Fritz, and I couldn't help but think of Elaine Venice the second you mentioned a subway stopping. Oh, I don't remember that one. Oh, it was the great Seinfeld episode where Elaine was stuck on a out-of-work suburb. Oh, man. A malfunctioning subway.

It was pretty great. Okay. I had a great experience in New York years ago, and I might have told this one before, but where there was a guy kind of stomping up and down the subway platform saying he was going to shove someone onto the oncoming train. And just instinctively, a group of 20 New Yorkers and me went and gathered together in a group with a mother and her baby at the center of that atom. Wow.

At the nucleus. And it wasn't, no one said, all right, everyone, let's get together here. We all just stood together, got just wandered closer to one another and probably all making our way toward that woman and her baby. And before you know it, there was a big group of us standing in a circle. And that's the one where I went and met the cops upstairs and led them to the guy. Awesome, dude. I was pretty obvious who it was, but I was like, hey, he's down here, and boy, New York City's finest, they acted with intention. That's what I'll all say. Yeah. So what you

just said, that story undermines a very famous, misguided idea about crowds the bystander effect, which we talked about at great length in our episode on Kitty Genovese. That's right. But one study I saw recently found that they were studying all sorts of fights that were caught on like security cameras or whatever. And I think 90% of these fights, at least one person intervened, most of the time more than one person intervened. And so the bystander effect says the more people there are, the less likely anyone is to act to help. They found the opposite was true. The more people there were, the more people helped intervene in this violent fight. So that whole idea that people just don't do that is actually untrue.

It's based on misreporting by a New York Times article. That's right. But there are, there's evidence that there are other reasons people might not necessarily not render aid, but say not speak up or share their opinions because they're in a group too, right? Yeah, that's sort of like if you're in a classroom and the teacher asks if anyone has any anything else to say or whatever or has any questions. Right. And nobody says anything, even though they might have questions.

I remember doing that. Sure. I still do that. Yeah, I'm sure I would too in a classroom setting. But I would just assume like I was the only one who didn't get it. Or I and probably a lot of other people were just ready to leave. Well, in a classroom, I don't think that factors in. but as an adult, I think you're right on the money.

I've been in situations where it's a, oh, I don't know, if you're in a public meeting for something or if you're on the board of a local garden or whatever, and you can get the sense that everyone wants to go home. Yeah. You don't want to be that person that's like, well, I have another point at the end of it. Right.

Well, there's a difference between asking a question and liking to hear yourself talk. Well, very good point. So, yeah, that's called pluralistic, ignorance where you feel like, even though your opinions differ, you are making an assumption about the rest of the group that they feel this way so you don't want to make waves when it turns out most of the group probably feels the same way you do. Yeah, for sure. I did want to follow up with a stat that you found. Yeah. I want to follow up with your information. Because when you were talking

about Fritz, I think this idea that, you know, if you watch the news, you might think every protest leads to violence or, you know, the summer of violence with George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and stuff like that. Or pro-Palestinian campus protest. There are stats on this stuff, like there's raw numbers. And of the 553 pro-Palestine campus protests between April and April 18th and May 3rd, 2024, 97% were what was classified as overwhelmingly peaceful. And the same with Black Lives Matter, there were 2,400. demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd, and I think it was 93% of them remained entirely peaceful. They were less than 220 out of the 2400 that had any kind of violence whatsoever.

Right. So, yes. That's good news. I mean, yeah, that's great news. And I think that the Black Lives Matter George Floyd protests were one of the things that really kind of changed a lot of scholarship or gave a lot of weight to some of the emerging scholarship that crowds actually aren't bad necessarily, and they can be beneficial socially too. Yeah, because they don't, the news doesn't cover 2400 peaceful protests. They cover the ones,

you know, and I guess I get it because it's the news. And if it's, I guess I get it is all I'm saying. Yeah, I want to do an episode on how the news affects the world

and how it has so far because I think it's done a lot of damage. Yeah. I agree. There's one other thing, too. We mentioned like, say the presence of police in riot gear can actually trigger violence that otherwise might not have taken place in a crowd. That's not the only thing. If there are weapons of whoever has the weapons,

that can change things. And then another really big one that cannot be overlooked is the presence of a lot of people on alcohol. Yeah. That has caused a lot of riots. It just has. Like, you're not going to set a couch on fire in the street normally. But if you're drunk and you're part of a crowd whose basketball team just lost in the final four, there's a good chance you're going to do something like that. And alcohol fuels a lot of the problematic, unlawful crowds that turn ugly. Yeah, those the, it's a lot of times it's the winning team. And that just, it's always very frustrating to see the news after a city has won a big, important championship. Yeah. Important to the fans. And then there's a big group of people.

Like, I've been among those parties. I remember in Athens when the Braves won their first world series back in the day. Oh, that was such a great night. The streets flooded and it was amazing. Yeah. But, you know, we've seen that same thing. All of a sudden, people are flipping over cop cars. Yeah.

It's setting them on fire. It's like, I'm so happy that I'm going to set this car on fire. Yeah. Yeah, that's a shame. It's like ruining it for the best, for the rest of us, and the best of us. I saw that that same kind of thing ruined the Keene Pumpkin Festival years back. Oh, I think we talked about that. Did we?

I think years ago, you definitely mentioned that. Otherwise, I don't see how I would have known. Yeah, I don't remember it at all, but I'll go with your interpretation. Yeah, it might have been during our early Pumpkin Chunken coverage days. Didn't we do a whole episode on Pumpkin Chunkin? Oh, yeah, we worked for Discovery Channel. We sure did. They made it so.

Yes. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I thought that was super interesting. I'm glad you picked that one. Yeah, well, thank Kimberly. Yeah, thanks Kimberly. But it was interesting, Chuck, and thanks for doing that.

And I'll thank myself from you as well. Okay. Since I just thank myself on behalf of Chuck, I think it's time for listener, man. That's right. I was thinking, by the way, and you diverted that to Kimberly. Okay. Delected. Hey, guys, I was listening to the short stuff about

color psychology, and I got to say I was a little disappointed. There was no mention of drunk tank pink. Didn't know this. If it's not obvious, it gets his name from being the go-to color of choice for drunk tanks because of the noticeable calming effect it has on belligerent people. I was so intrigued by this that I painted my bathroom, drunk tank pink. This is Hannah. Hannah sent in a picture, too. I didn't ask Hannah why she felt the need to do this, but she did it. Okay. There's a book called Drunk Tank Pink by author Adam Alter that dives into the psychology behind it. I'd think you would both find this super interesting. Man, I'm sorry we missed that because that is awesome.

I agree. And by the way, Hannah got tickets to our show in Akron, Ohio, as a birthday present for her partner. Awesome. Who had been listening since he was 15 years old. Wow. And he's now 72. That's right.

And asked if we could give an on-stage shout-out. And Hannah, sadly, we don't do that because we get a lot of requests, and it's no fun sitting around as an audience member for 10 minutes while we read people's names. Really isn't. We're going to do it right here and wish a very future happy birthday to Isaac Kniece. Nice. Happy birthday, Isaac. That was quite magnanimous of your Chuck.

Yeah, because we usually don't do it on the episode either. But since Drunk Tank Pink was such a great email, Hannah, we want to say happy, happy birthday to Isaac. And we hope you both have a great time in Akron. Yes. Yeah, we'll see you guys there. Make sure you stand up and go Drunt Tank Pink in the middle of the show. Oh, no, don't. If you want to be like Hannah, you can send us an email to say whatever you like in it.

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