Explaining effervescence: Investigating the relationship between shared social identity and positive experience in crowds

Abstract

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these to be more likely when participants perceived crowd members to share a common collective identity. We investigated these predictions in a survey of pilgrims (N = 416) attending a month-long Hindu pilgrimage festival in north India. We found participants' perceptions of a shared identity amongst crowd members had an indirect effect on their positive experience at the event through (1) increasing participants' sense that they were able to enact their collective identity and (2) increasing the sense of intimacy with other crowd members. We discuss the implications of these data for how crowd emotion should be conceptualised.

Keywords:

• Crowds
• Effervescence
• Shared identity
• Positive emotion
• Collective self-realisation

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the advice received from Dr Kavita Pandey, Dr Shail Shankar, Dr Tushar Singh (all at the Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, Allahabad), Prof. Mark Levine (Exeter, England) and Dr Gozde Ozakinci (St Andrews, Scotland).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ESRC [grant number RES-062-23-1449].