That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Crowds

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

Whether pushing through people at a shopping mall or standing shoulder to shoulder at a concert, being in crowds is a common experience. For some of us, that experience is overwhelmingly negative. In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy we discuss the neuroscience behind our behaviour in crowds, and how our brain changes when surrounded by others. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So I was walking across campus this week, and it was right between classes. And all of a sudden, there's just this mass of people everywhere it's people are going in every direction to get to different buildings and I just found myself moving from you know something that was pretty peaceful and and in a nice walk into a crowd and I've never really liked crowds you know I try to avoid shopping malls if I can especially

around a holiday like Christmas. I can handle sports games, but just because usually I enjoy that. You'd never see me on the floor show of a concert. But this isn't uncommon. There's a lot of people that don't like crowds. So today I thought I'd dive into this a bit more and talk about the neuroscience of crowds and what's going on in our head and what we like and what we don't like. So it's interesting because when I started researching this,

because it's something that we don't talk about in my lab very often, I was surprised by what I learned. For instance, there's a Dr. Clark McPhail. He's an emeritus professor of sociology in the States. And he is one of the first people to actually start studying large crowds. And he doesn't even like the word crowd. He prefers something else because he thinks there's just two inaccurate stereotypes about crowds. People just have these beliefs that just simply aren't true.

People just have these beliefs that just simply aren't true. And for a long time, what I learned is sociologists and biologists thought that crowds behaved like a herd of animals. Essentially, the will of the group becomes the will of everything, and individuals don't get to think or make decisions. And that's how large, at least certain animals work, right? They basically work as a unit once there's enough animals present. But what Dr. McPhail found was that that's not what actually happens. There's people that still think individually.

The crowd itself is still a bunch of individuals. And they do have the ability to act on their own. Some of them will do some dumb things, and some of them will do some really bright things. And the crowd's behavior depends on the individuals and how they're interacting with each other and not some collective consciousness. That's a phrase that he used, and I like that

because the other example he used was this idea that a crowd has its own central nervous system. And that's not true. A crowd is made up of individuals. So basically the research that he's done and others have done is that crowds generally don't actually act as a mass. They do in some special instances, but a lot of the times they don't. And he actually looked at September 11th when it happened and found that lots of people were able to organize themselves into small groups and make plans and function in that environment. There wasn't a herd mentality. Now there can be a herd mentality sometimes, especially if things start to get out of hand and people

start to get scared and panic. So it does happen, but that is incredibly rare. And what's happened is we see that in the news a lot, right? The news has a tendency, I've found, to cover murder, death, riots. So we see that this is how crowds behave behave but what we don't see are all of the other times which is the vast majority where the crowd actually acts in a rational fashion and basically one of the other areas he he looks into which i found really interesting was training police officers to deal with crowds because he said there is a tendency for a police officer to find, say, one person acting out in a crowd and then assume that that's the whole crowd.

But that's not true. There's just this small subset of people that might be breaking the law or doing something dangerous. So his training with the police officers is basically being to isolate the small number of people that are doing things that might be dangerous and focus on them as opposed to treating the crowd as a whole. Now, that doesn't really explain why people don't like being in crowds. And the most common answer for this is one that we've talked about before, which is stress and anxiety. For a lot of people, when you move into a crowded situation, there's this massive release of cortisol.

And if you think back to the episodes on stress and anxiety, cortisol basically is what causes the stress reaction. It causes you to sweat more, breathe differently, and all the things we associate with a stress attack or an anxiety attack. And that's what's happening for these people. When you move into a crowd, there's an increase in stress and anxiety and cortisol is released. What can you do about it? So if you're one of these people that has this reaction, well, you need to sit down and figure out what is it that stresses you about the crowd. It could be that you've had a bad reaction in the past, okay? So you were in a crowd and for some reason you did get jammed or compressed or something bad happened.

But you have to figure it out. And then in the case of the research that's being done, have to realize that the bad experiences in crowds are the minority of things. All right. That doesn't happen very often. Most of the time you can go into a crowd and be safe. Now we are creatures that learn. So the other thing you have to do is you have to learn this. All right. So you need to move into crowds from time to time. You need to spend some time in crowds. You might want to start with something small and work your way up. I wouldn't suggest going to Grand Central Station in New York right off the bat. But you could work your way into this because you will learn this. What happens when we expose ourselves to these things is we learn. All right.

We learn that we're not going to get hurt and nothing bad is going to happen. And our brains hold on to that. And our brains can control things at cortisol levels. If we are not stressed or anxious, cortisol levels are reduced. That's why if you do have a stress or anxiety attack, one of the recommendations I've always had is just find a quiet space and breathe. Because as you relax, the distress and anxiety attack will disappear. And we have to also realize that there's lots of parts of the world where crowds are just a way

of life. So people can deal with these situations. You know, if you move, if you go to Japan, for instance, parts of China, parts of India, even central London, England, New York City, there are people that work and live in crowds every single day. So we are able to learn and adapt to these things. Now, with that said, there is a very small subset of people that would struggle adapting to a crowd. And for that group of people, your choice is to really talk to someone about it, a clinical neuropsychologist, a counselor, or something

like this. Some of the other interesting things I learned about crowds is that crowds can actually influence what we think and what we experience. So I found one research study was pretty cool. They basically had people in an MRI scanner, and they were doing that to measure brain activity. MRI scanner. And they were doing that to measure brain activity. And what happened then is they had people experience different types of heat to cause a pain response. So they would cue you that you were going to get, say, a hot heat and you would get a hot heat. And then you would get a cue about what the next bit of heat is. And people were influenced by the cues that were there. All right. So if you were told you were going to get a hot heat, even if the next heat was not that hot that you experienced, you would perceive it as actually being hotter than it actually is,

because you had learned that the hot heat picture most of the time predicts hot heat. That's a form of classical or Pavlovian conditioning. But the part of the study that was really interesting to me was that social cues. So when people were told about what other people experienced, so the person before you or the person last week, that would actually bias the way you think and feel as well. So that social information biases how you feel. And this is one of the things that if you think of big crowds and maybe people panicking a bit, if enough people start to panic,

that's going to bias your perception of what's going on and you will start to panic. And those are the rare times when crowds do get out of control. And in terms of brain bits, that social stuff, hit a whole bunch of parts of the brain, the anterior insular cortex, which is tied to emotional responses, frontal parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is you obviously processing the information,

and parietal parts of the brain, which is where the sensory network is. And that sensory information obviously needs to be modulated and can be modulated by your social perception. Now, there's a few other things I thought I'd throw in here for just to round out this discussion of crowds. Group behaviors, all right? A classic study that's been done multiple times is you basically have one or two people who are in on the study and you go to a busy place and then you just find something and you point at it or you stare at it. And if enough people start to do this, then people who are not in on the study will stop and stare and they might

even start pointing. And the reason for that is we are statistical creatures. When we process the world around us, our brain thinks statistically. So even if we can't see what people are pointing at, we believe that if that many people see it, it has to be there and the fault's with us. And this is a common social phenomenon. This happens all the time. People tend to conform in crowds. And you might have experienced this. People even start walking instead, for instance. This is all the time. People tend to conform in crowds. And you might have experienced this. People even start walking in step, for instance. But this is all driven by us being social creatures and the fact that we live in a statistical world.

We live in a world full of probabilities and accumulation of evidence and not just a black and white truth. The other one that I did find some stuff on, which I've heard about for a long time, is the concept of bystander syndrome. And the classic example of bystander syndrome is there's a group of people and someone mugs someone and no one does anything to help. Everyone's just standing there watching and no one steps in to help. This is kind of the same thing. If no one's reacting, we tend not to react as well because we like to conform socially

with what's happening. And what's interesting about those studies, if you simulate that, because it's always a simulated mugging, of course, if there's only one person watching, they very quickly engage and try to help. But if there's a large crowd of people and no one's doing anything, then people tend not to engage, which is kind of interesting. It just shows us how much we can be controlled by the herd mentality. Anyway, that's a bit on the neuroscience of crowds. So if you're feeling uneasy in a crowd, remember that's just a stress and anxiety reaction, which is driven by cortisol. The best way to work through that is to try to just expose yourself to more crowds.

Bear in mind what I said at the outset. The vast majority of crowd situations end up being completely harmless and no one gets hurt. It's okay. And at the end there, I told you some cool studies and explained a few phenomenon. Anyway, that's all I've got for this week remember the website thatneuroscienceguy.com there's links to patreon where you can support us you just use your credit card dollar five dollars a week or a month everything goes to graduate students in my lab links to our etsy store thanks to those of you that have bought shirts please Please follow me on X at that neuroscience guy.

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My name is Olive Kregolson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another neuroscience bite.