The experience of collective participation: shared identity, relatedness and emotionality

Abstract

This paper presents three studies that explore the experience of participating in crowd events. Analysis of semi-structured interviews with football supporters and student demonstrators is used to illustrate the role that shared identity plays in transforming within-crowd social relations (relatedness), and the positive impact this has upon emotionality of collective experience. Questionnaire data collected at a music festival are then used to confirm these claims. The paper argues for a conceptual distinction between shared identity and self-categorisation, and against the contention in classic crowd psychology that a loss of identity is at the root of collective emotion. It concludes by suggesting avenues for future research, including the potential role for collective experience in encouraging future co-action.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by an ESRC Postgraduate Studentship (PTA-030-2006-00100) awarded to the first author. The authors wish to thank the Editors and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and valuable comments; as well as Oliver Lauenstein, Tom Clemens and Wendy van Rijswijk for help with data collection.

Notes

This venue was chosen because it was the meeting place for the University Court. Serendipitously, the adjacent building was the School of Psychology, allowing us to film the rally from an aerial vantage point.

Transcription conventions are based upon the suggestions given by Parker (1992, p. 124). Where text has been omitted from the transcript, it is signalled by a pair of empty brackets, thus ‘[ ]’. Pauses in speech lasting longer than three seconds are indicated with three full stops (an ellipsis), thus ‘…’. Information provided by the author for clarification, including a description of participant actions, is given within brackets, ‘[like this]’.

The questionnaire originally contained three social identity items, but the ingroup ties item (‘I feel strong ties with others who share this identity’) was removed prior to analysis due to its similarity to the relatedness measure.

A second emotional intensity of experience item, ‘Being in the Rock Ness crowd is a dull experience’ (reverse coded) (Totally Disagree/Totally Agree), was removed from the analysis because the term ‘dull’ may have led participants to answer the item in terms of the positivity of their experience.

The total effect of the independent variable and mediator upon the dependent variable does not need to be significant in order to demonstrate mediation (Hayes, 2009; Rucker et al., 2011).