{"id":178518,"date":"2025-10-04T06:00:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T06:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/178518\/"},"modified":"2025-10-04T06:00:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T06:00:06","slug":"swearing-booing-and-spitting-is-crowd-behaviour-out-of-control-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/178518\/","title":{"rendered":"Swearing, booing and spitting: is crowd behaviour out of control? | Psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"

The abuse<\/a> hurled at Europe\u2019s golfers in the Ryder Cup elicited gasps and dismay on both sides of the Atlantic. The crowd at the Bethpage Black course in New York graduated from boos and heckles to homophobic slurs and insults aimed at players\u2019 wives. The first-tee master of ceremonies set the tone by leading a chant of \u201cfuck you, Rory!\u201d, putting Rory McIlroy firmly in the crosshairs \u2013 along with his wife, who was hit with a beer cup.<\/p>\n

After initially playing it down, American golf officials apologised<\/a> and said some fan behaviour had \u201ccrossed the line\u201d, but the affair has left a nagging sense of unease. What if the line has in fact moved? What if accepted codes of crowd behaviour have changed?<\/p>\n

It is a question social scientists and event managers have been asking in recent years and spans several countries and types of spectacle, obviating any sense that the issue is confined to US golf fans.<\/p>\n

New York state park police watch the crowd at the Ryder Cup tournament on the Bethpage Black golf course. Photograph: Lindsey Wasson\/AP<\/p>\n

Taunting banners brandished at football terraces, gum spat at tennis players, objects hurled on to concert stages, heckles during concerts \u2013 an apparently never-ending litany of boorish, loutish behaviour fills news feeds.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s undeniable that in all aspects of public life a growing number of people are becoming more belligerent,\u201d said Kirsty Sedgman<\/a>, a University of Bristol cultural studies scholar.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just that people are becoming more badly behaved, it\u2019s that when they\u2019re called out, instead of simmering down they\u2019re much more likely to turn against those making the complaint.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre union (Bectu) published a survey<\/a> that showed 34% of those working in live events in the UK had experienced antisocial behaviour, violence, aggression or harassment from audience members in the past 12 months, with that figure rising to 77% for front-of-house staff.<\/p>\n

Some theorists of crowd psychology attribute aggression to \u201cdeindividuation\u201d, whereby a sense of anonymity and sensory overload untether people from their sense of individual identity and they do things they ordinarily would not.<\/p>\n

Other theorists posit \u201cconvergence\u201d, in which the crowd dynamic uncorks individuals\u2019 inner beliefs and values.<\/p>\n

Either way, the results can be ugly. \u201cFaggot!\u201d some US fans screamed at McIlroy. \u201cWanker!\u201d shouted others. Many commentators have linked such invective to toxic social media feeds and the climate of political polarisation, which suggests a modern phenomenon.<\/p>\n

But there is nothing new in sports fans or theatre audiences behaving badly. In ancient Athens, Plato complained about spectators becoming mobs, arguably making him the first theorist of crowd behaviour.<\/p>\n

Any gathering of humans, in fact, can cause upset. Thomas Hardy took the title of his novel Far From the Madding Crowd from Thomas Gray\u2019s 1751 poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard<\/a>, that railed against the \u201cignoble strife\u201d of those who disrupt \u201csacred calm\u201d.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s anxiety over the coarsening of crowd behaviour can be overdone and is to some extent \u201cmoral panic\u201d, said Sedgman. \u201cEach society has golden-age thinking \u2013 looking back to a time when everyone was kind and courteous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plastic beer cups lie on the pitch after the Uefa Euro 2024 match between Croatia and Italy in Leipzig. Photograph: Dan Mullan\/Getty<\/p>\n

Some Scottish boxing fans still squirm over memories of a crowd booing Muhammad Ali during an exhibition bout at Paisley in 1965. \u201cAll booing must stop when the king\u2019s in the ring,\u201d he exhorted in vain.<\/p>\n

Eric Cantona took more direct action in 1995 when a Crystal Palace fan shouted \u201cfuck off back to France you French motherfucker\u201d by leaping over the barrier to deliver a kung fu kick<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some experts question whether modern manners really have degraded. \u201cThe headlines tend to come from high-profile incidents: disorder at Wembley, gate-rushing at the Copa Am\u00e9rica final,\u201d said Anne Marie Chebib, the managing director of the UK Crowd Management Association (UKCMA<\/a>). \u201cYet the data tells us these are exceptions. The overwhelming majority of events take place safely and securely, with no disruption, but those stories rarely make the news.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 2023 poll of the association\u2019s members, 93% reported deteriorating behaviour but the following year 57% reported no change or only a slight worsening, a pattern replicated in a Global Crowd Management Alliance<\/a> report. \u201cMany practitioners now see behaviour as broadly stable,\u201d said Chebib.<\/p>\n

Diogenes the Cynic (c412-404BC to 323BC) challenges Plato in the academy at Athens. Photograph: Alamy<\/p>\n

Stephen Reicher<\/a>, a University of St Andrews psychology professor and an authority on crowd behaviour, said there were perennial fears about the rowdiness and danger of crowds but that violence was extremely rare.<\/p>\n

Of 49 million attendances at British football matches last year, there were 1,963 arrests, of which half were disorder, he said. \u201cYou would likely get far more arrests if that many people of that demographic were in town of a Saturday afternoon. So you could argue that people are less likely to be disorderly and violent in a football crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, crowds make news only when there are disturbances, said Reicher. \u201cYou can have hundreds of games on a Saturday afternoon and violence at one. So which will be reported? And if we only see crowds when crowds are violent we get a highly distorted view of crowds as characteristically violent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ryder Cup\u2019s history and uniqueness suggest other reasons not to extrapolate too much from the scenes at Bethpage Black. The 1999 contest at Brookline, Massachusetts, was marred by abuse likened to a bear pit. McIlroy asked security officials to expel a particularly obnoxious heckler at Hazeltine in Minnesota in 2016.<\/p>\n

Eric Cantona delivers a kung fu kick to a Crystal Palace fan in 1995. Photograph: Action Images<\/p>\n

The tournament is structured around the US versus Europe at a time that Donald Trump is reconfiguring the meaning of Americanism, said Reicher.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt affirms the new world against the old. It is about triumphalism, about domination, about success by any means necessary. It rejects a rule-based order. It celebrates masculinity, domination excess.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ryder Cup shows the traction it is getting among at least some Americans. We cannot suppose from that it is relevant to all sports or even all golf.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mark Breen, the strategic director of Safe Events Global<\/a>, a company that advises on security, said swift action can shape crowd behaviour.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about knocking bad norms on the head early, or establishing good ones,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNormal, decent people will get caught up in some behaviours so maybe you throw out the first hecklers, make an example of the worst offenders. But you don\u2019t want to sterilise the sport, take the passion out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fans watch Wet Leg play the Other stage at Glastonbury. \u2018You don\u2019t want to take the passion out,\u2019 say crowd security experts. Photograph: Guy Bell\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Adding concerts and other events as adjuncts to sporting occasions complicates the balance, said Breen. \u201cWhen you\u2019re building a festival vibe, it\u2019s harder to manage social norms. You just have to work as hard as you can to avoid boorishness.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Drury, a social psychology professor at the University of Sussex, said music event organisers had reported deteriorating audience behaviour since the Covid pandemic, to the point it was now normalised.<\/p>\n

One possible explanation was that lockdown restrictions stunted socialisation, said Drury. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a cohort of people that weren\u2019t socialised by older generations when they\u2019re going out, so they\u2019re not used to it, and so perhaps don\u2019t know what the norms are. What they\u2019re doing feels right to them, but to other people it doesn\u2019t feel right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another possible factor was audience members doing stunts to get attention on social media. In most cases it was just a tiny minority causing disruption, said Drury. \u201cBut these dramatic events are then presented as a kind of trend in audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sedgman has a more ominous analysis. Audience behaviour is a bellwether of wider societal trends and the apparent growth in loutishness, or lack of consideration, shows a fraying in the social contract, of the agreed norms that bind a society, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn increasing number of people think they don\u2019t need to follow these norms, that only mugs do so. It\u2019s the canary in the coalmine.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The abuse hurled at Europe\u2019s golfers in the Ryder Cup elicited gasps and dismay on both sides of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-178518","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}