Steve Reicher

Reicher's work on crowd psychology has been path-breaking. He challenged the dominant notion of crowd as site of irrationality and deindividuation. His social identity model (SIM, 1982, 1984, 1987) of crowd behaviour suggests that people are able to act as one in crowd events not because of 'contagion' or social facilitation but because they share a common social identity. This common identity specifies what counts as normative conduct. Unlike the 'classic' theories, which tended to presume that collectivity was associated with uncontrolled violence (due to a regression to instinctive drives or a pre-existing 'racial unconscious'), the social identity model explicitly acknowledges variety by suggesting that different identities have different norms – some peaceful, some conflictual – and that, even where crowds are conflictual, the targets will be only those specified by the social identity of the crowd.

Reicher's (1984) St Pauls' study was a powerful riposte to the whole 'irrationalist' tradition, from Gustav Le Bon to deindividuation. But the study and the social identity model left a number of unanswered questions and hence possible explanatory problems. The emphasis on social identity as the determinant of collective behaviour potentially led to a rather unidimensional reading of the nature of crowd conflict: conflict was 'read off' from the St Pauls' social identity, as if the participants were already 'violent'; yet this left unexplained how such conflict emerged and escalated over time during the riot. An unanswered question was therefore how an otherwise peaceful crowd might become conflictual. Without further specification, the model risked being read, like Allport's account, as seeing conflict as a product of fixed and pre-given identities that were simply acted out. How could behavioural change in the crowd be grasped without falling back into something like the LeBonian account in which the peaceful, rational individual is simply subsumed by the (malign) influence of the crowd?

The analysis of the St Pauls' riot was like a snap-shot, examining the nature of the crowd targets, without examining in detail how conflict actually emerged from relations with the police, and without including the perspective of the police as a possible contribution to the events. Subsequent studies of crowd events by Reicher, Clifford Stott and John Drury therefore began to address these absences. In each of a number of different type of crowd events, a similar pattern of interaction between crowd and police was identified. The observation of this pattern of interaction across these collaborative studies led to the elaborated social identity model (ESIM) of crowd conflict, which focuses on the emergence and development of crowd conflict.

Moreover, the ESIM provides the conceptual resources for understanding the possible articulation between social and psychological change. Thus the ESIM suggests that identity change is a function of changed context, brought about through the unintended consequences of one's own actions. The consequences are often unintended and unanticipated because crowd members' actions may be interpreted in contrasting ways by outgroups such as the police. The wider significance of such change is in terms of future action. A limited 'local' protest becomes understood as part of a wider struggle against national or even global 'injustice' where participants are cast as part of a wider oppositional group, where such opposition becomes legitimised by illegitimate outgroup (police, state) action and where there is a perception of wider support and that the collective is indeed capable of translating its ideas into reality. Particular experiences in collective action can therefore be significant in their role of encouraging people to get involved in further actions, which might themselves be forces for social change. Put simply, crowd conflict is argued to be meaningful, but can be a locus of social and psychological change because that meaning may be contested.

Reicher collaborated with Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter on the BBC television programme The Experiment,[2] which examined conflict, order, rebellion and tyranny in the behaviour of a group of individuals held in a simulated prison environment. The experiment (which became known as the BBC Prison Study) re-examined issues raised by the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) and led to a number of publications in leading psychology journals. Amongst other things, these challenged the role account of tyranny associated with the SPE as well as broader ideas surrounding the Banality of evil, and advanced a social identity-based understanding of the dynamics of resistance.

Reicher was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2004. He was interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili for The Life Scientific first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2018.[5]