Crowds and Territoriality
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Living in a group confers both advantages and disadvantages:

A territory can be defined as an area of space which is held and defended by a single animal or a social group.

Varies across species; territories tend to be functional - those used for courtship displays tend to be relatively small those used for  food resources and rearing of the young tend to be larger.

Manning (1973) suggests that territories are like elastic discs - the centre is well defined and defended aggressively by the occupier, but further away from the centre the intruder is dealt with far less aggressively. 

People who live  in overcrowded conditions are more prone to high blood pressure, psychiatric hell, and a high mortality rate.  Crowding becomes stressful when it reduces one's sense of personal control and freedom. 

 People who live in small close-knit communities are more likely to help others than those living in large cities.  Milgram (1970)  study in which the "wrong numbers" were rung in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia and in small towns outside of these cities.  Distressed callers said they had no more money and requested a call to a friend - in all cases people were more helpful in the towns than in the cities.

Latante and Darley suggest that the following influences may contribute to "bystander apathy" or non - intervention in emergency situations:

diffusion of responsibility - the more bystanders present the less responsibility each bystander feels - may believe that somebody else will probably assist - responsibility is shared or diffused. Diffusion ids greater when we believe that others present are more competent to act.

Bystanders may interpret situation as a non-emergency if others around them are  acting in an apparently calm manner.  IN situations which are unclear we often look nervously around us for other to provide clues as to how we should act. Since everyone is acting in the same way, easy to form a conclusion that no action is necessary!

evaluation apprehension - people may be inhibited from acting because they do not want to look foolish or to suffer embarrassment - the greater the audience the more inhibited we feel.

Possibly in areas of greater density pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility are more likely to occur.  But also likely that the stress incurred in living in crowded conditions leads to people withdrawing and minding their own business as a means of protecting their own and others privacy.

People are more likely to help those who are smartly dressed than those who are unkempt (Blackman, 1974).  Victims are more likely to be helped if they are seen as deserving causes rather than the source of their own misfortune (Piliavin,1969)  We are more likely to help people whom we see as similar to ourselves.  West et al (1975) found that when a black person pretended to be a stranded motorist whose car had broken down, 97% of the people who offered to help were black - conversely when the victim was white, 94% of the helpers were white.  Men are more likely than women to help

Deindividuation

Gustave leBon: "The crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual ... The mob man is fickle, credulous and intolerant, showing the violence and ferocity of primitive beings .. women, children, savages, and lower classes, operating under the influence of the spinal cord." (1895)

 Believed that immoral and aggressive behaviours spread like contagion  through a mob or crowd.

Zimbardo argues that, under certain circumstances, we lose our sense of identity and become uncharacteristically aggressive.  He coined the term deindividuation  (also associated with Festinger) to describe this - individual surrenders his/her identity and sense of responsibility and simply becomes part of the crowd.  When people become deindivualised they lack heir usual self control, often resulting in such ant-social behaviour as vandalism.

Other Notes in this Category

1. Attitudes
2. Attitudes and Behaviour
3. Attribution
4. Conformity
5. Crowds and Territoriality
6. Goffman - Symbolic Interactionist
7. Impression Formation
8. Inference Model
9. Intuition model
10. Is there a conformity personality?
11. Obedience
12. Persuasion
13. Prejudice
14. Self Concept
15. Self-attribution processes
16. Social Influence
17. Stereotypes and Stereotyping
18. The Primacy-Recency effect
19. Zimbardo

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