Suicide Baiting
In January 2010, a distressed woman on a bridge over the M60 motorway in the UK brought the traffic to a four-hour standstill while the police attempted to talk her down. A radio DJ, Steve Penk, thought it would be a funny prank to play Van Halen’s hit track, ‘Jump’, for the frustrated drivers caught up in the drama.8 Moments later, the woman jumped allegedly after hearing the song on a radio turned up by one of the waiting motorists. Luckily, the woman survived her suicide attempt but Penk was unrepentant.
Left to his own devices, the DJ would not have taunted the potential suicide victim unless he thought his clowning would please the listeners. The drivers trapped on the motorway would probably not have normally wished this woman harm either. They were sufficiently removed from the incident that they did not feel any consequences of their actions. This kind of crowd behaviour is known as suicide baiting. Fortunately, it is very rare, probably because most suicides are not public spectacles. However, there are well-documented cases where crowds have urged individuals to kill themselves. How can we understand such behaviour? Conceivably this is not the sort of thing that individual members of a crowd would normally encourage on their own.
One explanation is that groups create deindividuation, a loss of the individual self. An analysis of 166 failed and successful suicide attempts across the US between 1966 and 1979 found that crowds were present in about twenty of them and, of those, half were found to bait or jeer the victim.9 The factors that seemed to link to baiting were larger crowds, the distance between the crowd and the victim, and the cover of night – arguably all factors that lead to greater anonymity.
Anonymity to outsiders appears to be the crucial factor when individuals feel that they are not accountable, which leads to greater antisocial behaviour. Riots, lynching and hooliganism are all believed to be examples of mob mentality that are thought to thrive through the process of deindividuation.10 In contrast, the more that we lose anonymity, the more we conform and behave. In one simple study, researchers placed a picture of a pair of eyes on the wall above a collection tin in the coffee room where members of staff paid for their beverages.11 For the next ten weeks they alternated posting pictures of flowers or watchful eyes above the coffee pot. People were more honest paying for their beverages when the eyes were posted. Just like the self-conscious Halloween children, we are more honest when a mirror is present to reflect our behaviour. When we are made self-conscious we become more accountable. For example, students consider working on an exam paper after time is up as cheating, and yet 71 per cent of them continue to do so if left alone. However, only 7 per cent do so if they are made self-aware by a mirror hanging in the exam room.12 Anything that exposes the self to the scrutiny of others makes us more prosocial. Groups can bring out both the good and bad sides of our self.
Does one really lose one’s individual identity in a crowd as deindividuation suggests? As the psychologist Vaughan Bell13 points out, anyone who has ever found themselves in a situation where they are suddenly under threat as a group does not necessarily lose identity – they just see themselves as part of a different, larger collective. For example, imagine you get on a crowded late-night bus home where there is a group of drunken students, an elderly couple and maybe a teenager playing his music too loudly through his personal stereo. You do not feel anything in common with them and might even resent your fellow travellers. However, if looters, aliens or zombies suddenly attack the bus, you spontaneously feel like a group and formulate plans to fend off the threat. You do not lose your identity but form a new one to address the group concern of which you are now a member. It’s the storyline of many film scripts where individuals discover themselves in threatening situations and, of course, this is where the heroes and villains emerge. So groups do not cause deindividuation but rather trump individualism depending on the context.14
Piggy in the Middle
Do you remember the childhood game, ‘piggy in the middle’? It’s a wicked teasing game. Usually, two players are supposed to pass a ball backwards and forwards to each other and the ‘piggy’ is the person in the middle who has to intercept it. Sounds harmless, doesn’t it. Except that whenever I was the piggy, I used to get very upset because it seemed as if I was being excluded.
Caring about what others think may be one of the strongest preoccupations we have as an animal. Indeed, as Philippe Rochat15 has pointed out, ‘To be human is indeed to care about reputation.’ To be ostracized from the group is the worst fate, which he calls ‘psychological death’. Being ignored and rejected by our peers is painful. Most of us can remember being very upset when we were teased as children or not picked to play on teams. At the time, these events seemed like personal tragedies.
This is why bullying is not simply physically abusive but psychologically traumatizing. According to a 2001 survey by the US National Institute of Child Health, one in three teenage children was involved in bullying.16 It is more prevalent in boys than girls and the patterns of abuse are different.17 For males, both physical and verbal bullying is common, whereas for females verbal bullying through taunting and rumour-mongering is typically more common. However, even though girls use less physical violence, neuroscience indicates they might as well punch their victims, as the pain of social rejection is just as real.
This is something that psychologist Kip Williams from Purdue University knows from experience. He was out in the park walking his dog one day when he was hit in the back with a Frisbee. He threw it back to one of the two guys who were playing with it who then began tossing it back to Kip. This was fun but, after about a minute, they stopped throwing the Frisbee to Kip and returned their attention to each other. At first Kip thought it was amusing but then it became clear that they were not going to include Kip in their game again. The psychology professor was surprised at how upset he was by this exclusion given that he had only been included in their game for a minute and that these were complete strangers. He realized how sensitive we are to ostracism.
Kip took his experiences from the park and developed a computer simulation known as ‘Cyberball’ where adult participants had their brains scanned as they played a game where they had to toss a ball back and forth between two other playmates.18 Just like the frisbee event, Cyberball was going along fine, until the two others started to only pass the ball back between themselves and ignore the adult in the brain scanner. When this exclusion became obvious, the ACC regions of the brain, which are activated by social cognition, started to light up with activity. This is because the pain of rejection also triggers the ACC – a result of its importance as a mechanism for conflict resolution. The social exclusion of the game had initially caused consternation and then distress, as it activated areas associated with emotional pain. Just like ego-depletion, those who were rejected by colleagues were more likely to eat fattening cookies, which is probably where comfort food gets its potency.19 When we say that our feelings are hurt, it may not simply be a metaphor we are using. We really feel as much pain as a punch in the stomach.
What is remarkable is how sensitive we are to being rejected. Even when participants played Cyberball for only a couple of minutes and were told that it was only a computer simulation, they still felt the pain of rejection.20 And this pain had nothing to do with the personality of the players either. They were not overly sensitive. Rather, there is something very fundamental and automatic about ostracism.21 Williams argues that this reaction must be hard-wired and points out that, in many other social species, ostracism often leads to death. That’s why humans are so sensitive. As soon as it looks as though we are in danger of being ostracized, we become hyper-vigilant to those around us, looking for clues in the way people are interacting and opportunities to re-engage with the group.22 Excluded individuals engage in behaviours that increase their likelihood of being reconciled back into the group. We are more likely to mimic, comply with requests, obey orders and cooperate with others who don’t deserve it. We become obsequious to the extent that we will agree with others who are clearly in the wrong.