Summary: General characteristics of the crowd. Crowd, crowd types 4 crowd types

Crowd

An accumulation of people deprived of a clearly perceived commonality of goals and organization, but interconnected by a similarity of emotional state and a common center of attention. The main mechanisms for the formation of T. and the development of its specific qualities are considered circular (increasing mutually directed emotional), as well as. There are four main types of T.:

1) occasional T., bound by curiosity about an unexpected incident (traffic accident, etc.);

2) conventional t., bound by an interest in some pre-announced mass entertainment (for example, certain types of sports, etc.) and ready, often only temporarily, to follow more or less diffuse norms of behavior;

3) expressive T., jointly expressing a general attitude to an event (joy, enthusiasm, indignation, protest, etc.), its extreme form is represented by ecstatic T., which, as a result of mutual rhythmically growing infection, reaches a state of general ecstasy (as in some ry mass religious rituals, carnivals, rock music concerts, etc.);

4) acting T., which, in turn, includes the following subspecies: a) aggressive T. (see), united by blind hatred for a certain object (lynching, beating of religious, political opponents, etc.);

b) panicked T., spontaneously escaping from a real or imaginary source of danger (see): c) acquisitive T., entering into disordered direct for the possession of any values ​​\u200b\u200b(money, places in outgoing transport, etc.); d) insurrectionary politics, in which people are bound by a common justified indignation at the actions of the authorities, it often constitutes an attribute of revolutionary upheavals, and the timely introduction of an organizing principle into it can elevate a spontaneous mass uprising to a conscious act of political struggle. The absence of clear goals, the absence or diffuseness of the structure give rise to the most important property of T. - its easy convertibility from one species (subspecies) to another. Such transformations often occur spontaneously, however, knowledge of their typical patterns and mechanisms makes it possible to deliberately manipulate the behavior of T. for adventurous purposes, and on the other hand, to consciously prevent and stop her especially dangerous actions.

Brief psychological dictionary. - Rostov-on-Don: PHOENIX. L.A. Karpenko, A.V. Petrovsky, M. G. Yaroshevsky. 1998 .

Crowd

A structureless accumulation of people, deprived of a clearly perceived commonality of goals, but mutually connected by the similarity of their emotional state and a common object of attention. The main mechanisms for the formation of the crowd and the development of its specific qualities are the circular reaction (growing mutually directed emotional infection), as well as rumors.

There are four main types;

1 ) an occasional crowd - bound by curiosity for an unexpected incident (traffic accident, etc.);

2 ) the crowd is a conventional crowd - bound by an interest in some pre-announced mass entertainment (sports, etc.) and ready, often only temporarily, to follow fairly diffuse norms of behavior;

3 ) expressive crowd - jointly expressing a general attitude to a certain event (joy, enthusiasm, indignation, protest, etc.); its extreme form is an ecstatic crowd, reaching a state of general ecstasy from mutual, rhythmically growing infection - as at some mass religious rituals, carnivals, rock music concerts, etc.;

4 ) crowd acting - contains subspecies:

a) an aggressive crowd - united by blind hatred for a certain object (lynching, beating of religious, political opponents, etc.);

from ) the crowd is acquisitive - entering into an unordered direct conflict for the possession of certain values ​​\u200b\u200b(money, places in outgoing transport, etc.);

d ) a rebel crowd - where people are connected by a common just indignation at the actions of the authorities; it often forms the basis of revolutionary upheavals, and the timely introduction of an organizing principle into it is capable of elevating spontaneous mass action to a conscious action of political struggle.

The absence of clear goals, the absence or diffuseness of the structure give rise to practically the most important property of the crowd - its easy convertibility from one species (subspecies) to another. Such transformations are often spontaneous, but knowledge of their laws and mechanisms allows one to deliberately manipulate the behavior of the crowd for adventurous purposes, or to consciously prevent and stop its dangerous actions.

Dictionary of practical psychologist. - M.: AST, Harvest. S. Yu. Golovin. 1998 .

Crowd

   CROWD (from. 593)

The first capital works, which can be called socio-psychological, appeared at the turn of the 20th - 20th centuries. First of all, they should include the work of the French psychologist, sociologist and historian Gustave Lebon "Psychology of the Crowd" (1895; in 1898 translated into Russian under the title "Psychology of Peoples and Masses", new edition - St. Petersburg, 1995), and also the works of his compatriot Gabriel Tarde, devoted to the psychology of social relations. To this day, these books are read with constant interest, which cannot be said about the cumbersome "Psychology of Peoples" by Wilhelm Wundt. In these books, as well as in "Social Psychology" by W. McDougall (which is recognized by many as the first proper socio-psychological work), ideas were developed concerning the psychology of large groups - "peoples and masses". In socio-psychological research, this problem subsequently receded into the background, although remarkable works on the psychology of large groups appeared later. The “Psychology of the Masses and Fascism” by W. Reich (1933; Russian translation - 1997), as well as the “Age of Crowds” by S. Moskovichi (1981; Russian translation - 1996) can be considered as brilliant examples, which, by the way, is largely based on to the performances of Lebon and Tarde. Moscovici concretizes the psychology of the masses in a whole system of ideas, among which the following are especially significant: Psychologically, a crowd is not a cluster of people in one place, but a human aggregate that has a mental community.

1. The individual exists consciously, and the mass, the crowd - unconsciously, since consciousness is individual, and the unconscious is collective.

2. Crowds are conservative despite their revolutionary mode of action. They end up restoring what they first overthrew, because for them, as for all those in a state of hypnosis, the past is much more significant than the present.

3. The masses, the crowds need the support of the leader, who captivates them with his hypnotizing authority, and not with the arguments of reason and not with submission to force.

4. Propaganda (or) have an irrational basis. This overcomes the obstacles that stand in the way of action. Since in most cases our actions are the result of beliefs, a critical mind, lack of conviction and passion interfere with actions. Such interference can be eliminated by hypnotic, propagandistic suggestion, and therefore propaganda addressed to the masses must use an energetic and figurative language of allegories with simple and imperative formulations.

5. In order to control the masses (party, class, nation, etc.), politics must be based on some higher idea (revolution, Motherland, etc.), which is introduced and nurtured in the minds of people. As a result of such suggestion, it turns into collective images and actions.

Summarizing all these important ideas of mass psychology coming from Le Bon, Moscovici emphasizes that they express certain ideas about human nature - hidden while we are alone, and declaring themselves when we are together. In other words, the fundamental fact is this: “Taken individually, each of us is ultimately intelligent; taken together, in a crowd, during a political rally, even in a circle of friends, we are all ready for the latest folly. Moreover, the crowd, the mass is understood as a social animal that has broken the chain, as an indomitable and blind force that is able to overcome any obstacles, move mountains or destroy the creations of centuries. For Moscovici, it is very important that the differences between people are erased in the crowd and people splash out their passions and dreams in often cruel actions - from base to heroic and romantic, from frenzied delight to martyrdom. Such masses play a particularly important role precisely in the 20th century (as a result of industrialization, urbanization, etc.). Therefore, according to Moscovici, the psychology of the masses, along with political economy, is one of the two sciences about man, the ideas of which made up history, since they specifically pointed to the main events of our era - to “massification”, or “massovization”.

Thus, (the crowd) is based primarily on the sharp opposition of the individual outside the crowd to him, who is in the crowd. Only in the second case does collectivity exist (a collective soul, in Le Bon's terminology) or even sociality.

A century ago, in his Psychology of Crowds, Le Bon wrote: “The main characteristic feature of our era is precisely the replacement of the conscious activity of individuals by the unconscious activity of the crowd”. The latter is almost exclusively controlled by the unconscious, that is, according to Le Bon, its actions are subject to the influence of the spinal cord rather than the brain.

The cited conclusion was made even before the emergence and development of Freud's psychoanalysis, which revealed the enormous role of the unconscious in the life of any "separately taken" human individual, and also in the life of society, civilization, crowds, etc. This means that, according to the general criterion of the unconscious, it is hardly possible to oppose each other the individual and the crowd. The same difficulty persists when such an opposition is carried out according to the criterion of sociality (if the latter is attributed only to the crowd, and not to an individual human individual).

However, it must be taken into account that in the psychology of the masses the crowd is understood very broadly. This is not only a spontaneous, unorganized accumulation of people, but also a structured, more or less organized association of individuals. For example, Le Bon has already proposed the following classification of crowds, the starting point of which is a "simple gathering" of people. First of all, it's a crowd heterogeneous: a) anonymous (street, etc.); b) non-anonymous (trial by jury, parliamentary meetings, etc.). And secondly, the crowd uniform: a) sects (political, religious, etc.); b) castes (military, workers, clergy, etc.); c) classes (bourgeoisie, peasantry, etc.). And according to Tarde, in addition to anarchic, amorphous, natural, etc. crowds, there are also organized, disciplined, artificial crowds (for example, political parties, state structures, organizations such as the church, the army, etc.). It was the artificial crowds that subsequently attracted the greatest attention of Z. Freud.

Analyzing these and other "transformed" forms of the crowd in depth, Muscovites, following Tarde, emphasize one more and, perhaps, the most significant transformation of the crowd ... into the public. If initially a crowd is an accumulation of people in one closed space at the same time, then the public is a scattered crowd. Thanks to the means of mass communication, there is no longer a need to organize meetings of people who would inform each other. These means penetrate into every house and turn every person into a member of a new mass. Millions of such people are part of a new type of crowd. Staying each at home, newspaper readers, radio listeners, TV viewers, users of electronic networks exist all together as a specific community of people, as a special kind of crowd.

In the field of psychoanalysis, the problems of large groups were elucidated in Freud's later works, primarily in the book Psychology of the Masses and the Analysis of the Human Self. In describing group behavior and, above all, intergroup aggression, Freud borrowed a lot from Le Bon and McDougall. Freely admitting his own gaps in the empirical study of the problem, Freud readily accepted the main ideas of both authors regarding the aggressive aspects of crowd behavior, but gave them a complete psychological, more precisely, psychoanalytic interpretation. In Le Bon's work, Freud was especially impressed by the "brilliantly executed picture" of how, under the influence of the crowd, individuals discover their basic instinctive nature, how unconscious impulses suppressed for the time being are manifested in the crowd, how a thin layer of civilized behavior is torn apart and individuals demonstrate their true, barbaric and primitive beginning . At the same time, the starting point (and then the fundamental conclusion) of Freud's analysis of interpersonal relations and the psychology of the masses was his position that the study of various phenomena of culture and psychology of groups does not reveal patterns that differ from those that are revealed when studying the individual.

Turning to the study of various social communities, Freud specifically identified two of their supporting types: the crowd (an unorganized conglomerate, a gathering of people) and the mass (a crowd organized in a special way, in which there is some commonality of individuals with each other, expressed in their common interest in some object, homogeneous feelings and the ability to influence each other). Freud considered the presence in the community of libidinal attachment to the leader (leader) and the same attachment between the individuals that make it up as an essential distinguishing feature of the mass. At the same time, it was assumed that just such a community is a "psychological mass". Being aware of the existence of various masses and even distinguishing two main types of them: natural masses (self-organizing) and artificial masses (formed and existing with some external violence), Freud at the same time noted the similarity between the mass and the primitive horde and proposed an understanding of the mass as continuation and, in a certain sense, re-creation of the primitive horde.

Investigating the differences and identity of the mass and the horde, he came to the conclusion that conscious individuality is suppressed in them, the thoughts and feelings of people acquire a certain uniformity and are oriented in the same directions, and in general they are dominated by collective motives that have a high degree unconsciousness, impulsivity and efficiency. Insisting on the existence of a libidinal structure and constitution of the mass, Freud especially noted the role of attachment to the leader, with the disappearance of which the mass disintegrates.

In the psychoanalytic psychology of groups, the foundations of which were laid by Z. Freud himself, a certain attention is paid to the role of various negative feelings and factors in the social relations of people. In particular, Freud came to the conclusion that, for example, hatred towards some object can also unite individuals, like positive feelings, and envy can act as a source of ideas of equality and other pseudo-humanistic ideals.

Popular psychological encyclopedia. - M.: Eksmo. S.S. Stepanov. 2005 .

Crowd

In addition to the obvious definition (large gathering of people), the term has a special meaning in the study of youth. Here he denotes a large, loosely organized group that can give the adolescent a sense of identity based on the apereotype of the group before he has developed a sense of his own ideation.

Psychology. AND I. Dictionary-reference book / Per. from English. K. S. Tkachenko. - M.: FAIR-PRESS. Mike Cordwell. 2000 .

See what "crowd" is in other dictionaries:

Crowd- in China, the Crowd (other Greek ... Wikipedia

crowd- n., f., use. very often Morphology: (no) what? crowds, why? crowd, (see) what? crowd what? crowd, about what? about the crowd; pl. what? crowds, (no) what? crowds, why? crowds, (see) what? crowds, what? crowds about what? about crowds 1. A crowd is a large ... Dictionary of Dmitriev

Social psychology: lecture notes Melnikova Nadezhda Anatolyevna

3. Crowd as a spontaneously organized group

The crowd is one of the large but poorly organized communities.

The elements of the crowd are socio-political crises that shake people's lives, as well as periods of transition from one state of society to another.

There are different definitions of a crowd.

What is common is the opposition of the crowd to all stable social communities, the deprivation of the crowd of clear signs and characteristics, which generally makes it difficult to understand it as a social phenomenon.

From a psychological point of view, a crowd is a collection of people who have certain features that differ from those that characterize the individual individuals that make up this collection (G. Lebon).

Crowd- an unstructured accumulation of people, deprived of a clearly perceived commonality of goals, but interconnected by the similarity of their emotional state and a common object of attention.

The term "crowd" is ambiguous and is used to describe phenomena and processes that are very far from each other by nature.

The presence of a crowd always points to the presence of a certain community; some kind of connection between people, which can be secondary, temporary, and random.

Crowd- this is a relatively short-term, weakly organized and unstructured accumulation (gathering) of many, interconnected by a common emotional state, a conscious or unconscious goal and having a huge (incommensurable with the individual) power of influencing society and its life, capable of disorganizing their behavior in an instant and activity.

The crowd, according to G. Tarde, is a pile of heterogeneous, unfamiliar elements.

The characteristic feature of the crowd is its sudden organization.

It has no prior desire for a common goal, it does not have a collective desire.

Meanwhile, among the diversity of her movements, there is some expediency in actions and aspirations.

The very word "crowd" as a collective name indicates that the mass of individuals is identified with one person.

Among the reasons for the unity of thought observed in the crowd, P. Bordieu highlights ability to imitate.

Each person is disposed to imitate, and this ability reaches its maximum in people gathered together.

Many writers have tried to explain this phenomenon by resorting to Joly's moral epidemic hypothesis: "Imitation is a real epidemic, depending on the example, just as the possibility of contracting smallpox depends on the poison with which the latter is spread."

On this basis, a moral epidemic explained the epidemic of crimes that followed some crime, which was widely written about in the press.

According to Sergius and G. Tarde, any idea, any spiritual movement of an individual is nothing but a reflex to an impulse received from outside.

Everyone acts, thinks only thanks to some suggestion.

This suggestion may extend either to only one individual, or to several, or even to a large number of persons; it can spread like a true epidemic.

“Based on the type of dominant emotion and behavioral characteristics, researchers distinguish the following types of crowds.

Random (occasional) crowd occurs due to some unexpected event.

It is formed by "onlookers", persons who are in need of new experiences.

The main emotion is people's curiosity.

A random crowd can quickly gather and disperse just as quickly. Usually few.

Conventional crowd- a crowd whose behavior is based on explicit or implied norms and rules of behavior - conventions.

Gathered about a pre-announced event, people are usually driven by a well-directed interest, and they must follow the rules of conduct appropriate to the nature of the event.

expressive crowd is distinguished by a special power of mass manifestation of emotions and feelings.

It is the result of the transformation of a random or conventional crowd, when people, in connection with certain events that they witnessed, and under the influence of their development, are seized by a general emotional mood expressed collectively.

An expressive crowd can transform into an extreme form - ecstatic crowd, i.e., the type of crowd when the people who form it drive themselves into a frenzy in joint prayer, ritual or other actions.

All three types of crowds are passive. D. D. Bessonov proposed to consider the crowd as expectant (passive) and acting (active).

Active (active) crowd- the most important type of crowd, given the social danger of some of its subspecies.

The most dangerous is aggressive crowd- a congestion of people seeking destruction and even murder.

The people who make up the aggressive crowd do not have a rational basis for their actions.

More often it is the result of the transformation of a random, conventional or expressive crowd.

In the crowd, people descend to a primitive state, which is characterized by irrational behavior, the dominance of unconscious motives, the subordination of the individual to the collective mind or "racial unconscious".

The qualities found by the individual in the crowd are a manifestation of the unconscious, which contains all human evil ”(3. Freud).

Another subspecies of the acting crowd is panic crowd- a congestion of people seized with a sense of fear, the desire to avoid some imaginary or real danger.

Panic- this is a socio-psychological phenomenon of the manifestation of the group affect of fear.

The resulting fear blocks the ability of people to rationally assess the situation that has arisen.

A subspecies of the acting crowd is acquisitive crowd- an accumulation of people who are in direct and disorderly conflict among themselves because of the possession of certain values ​​that are not enough to satisfy the needs or desires of all participants in this conflict.

Some researchers of the phenomenon of the crowd distinguish rebel crowd as an indispensable attribute of all revolutionary events.

The actions of the insurgent crowd are distinguished by their specificity and focus on an immediate change in the situation, which somehow does not suit its participants.

The issue of criminal liability is relatively simple if the perpetrator of the crime is one person.

The question becomes extremely difficult when the perpetrators of the crime are not a few persons, but a very large number of them.

Some, following the military law of punishment through the tenth, that is, having punished several people, successfully, but often without any sense, stop the excitement in the crowd and inspire fear in it.

People's judges often leave everyone free, thus acting, according to Tacitus: "Where there are many guilty, no one should be punished."

The classical school of criminal law never questioned whether a crime committed by a crowd should be punished in the same way as the crime of one person.

It was quite enough for her to study crime as a legal substance.

No matter how the criminal acts (alone or under the influence of the crowd), the reason that pushed him to the crime was always his free will.

The same punishment was always imposed for the same offense.

The positive school has proven that free will is an illusion of consciousness; she opened the hitherto unknown world of the anthropological, physical and social factors of crime and raised the idea that a crime committed by a crowd should be judged differently from one committed by one person, and this is because in the first and second cases, participation accepted by anthropological and social factors is different.

Pugliese first outlined the doctrine of criminal responsibility for a collective crime.

He admits semi-responsibility for all those who have committed a crime while being carried away by the crowd.

He named collective crime a strange and complex phenomenon when a crowd commits a crime, carried away by the words of a demagogue or irritated by some fact that is an injustice or an insult to it or seems to it to be so.

Two kinds collective crimes: crimes committed as a result of a general natural attraction to them; crimes caused by passions, expressed most clearly in the crimes of the crowd.

The first case is analogous to a crime committed by a born criminal, and the second is similar to that committed by an accidental criminal.

The first can always be warned, the second never. In the first, the anthropological factor prevails, in the second, the social factor dominates. The first excites a constant and very strong horror against the persons who committed it; the second is only an easy and short-term salvation.

L. Laverne to explain the crimes of the crowd, he used the assumption of a person's natural inclination to murder.

By itself, the crowd is more disposed to evil than to good. Heroism, kindness can be the qualities of one individual; but they are almost never the hallmarks of a crowd.

author Melnikova Nadezhda Anatolyevna

44. Crowd as a spontaneously organized group A crowd is an unstructured accumulation of people, devoid of a clearly perceived commonality of goals, but connected by a similarity of emotional state and a common object of attention. The presence of a crowd always focuses on the presence of a certain

author Kuznetsov Maxim Valerievich

Conventional Crowd This is a crowd that has gathered for some event, the location of which was known in advance. Such an event can be a football match, a boxing match, etc. This crowd is called conventional because before

From the book Social Engineering and Social Hackers author Kuznetsov Maxim Valerievich

Expressive crowd This is a crowd that expresses by its behavior any emotion, no matter what. The main distinguishing feature of such a crowd is the rhythm of movement. Such a crowd is made up of people chanting slogans at a rally, rhythmically dancing to the beat

From the book Social Engineering and Social Hackers author Kuznetsov Maxim Valerievich

The Active Crowd Finally, the fourth type of crowd is the active (or active) crowd. This is the most dangerous type of crowd. The acting crowd can be aggressive or panicky. A recent example of an aggressive crowd is the riots on Manezhnaya Square in

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author Chernyavskaya A. G.

Homogeneous Crowd A homogeneous crowd consists of three categories: sects, castes and classes. A sect represents the first degree of organization of a homogeneous crowd. It consists of individuals of different professions and upbringing, different environments, and the only connection between them is

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Organized Crime: The Modern Slave Trade Smugglers or "tractors" are criminals who, for money and bypassing immigration laws, transport people to other countries. The people they transport usually want to leave their homeland

From the book Psychology of Peoples and Masses author Lebon Gustave

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an unstructured accumulation of people, deprived of a clearly perceived commonality of goals, but interconnected by the similarity of their emotional state and a common object of attention. In the crowd, the conscious personality disappears: in the crowd, twenty professors behave in the same way as twenty housewives. One of the scientific problems is to distinguish between the crowd and the public. In the first they are united physically, psychologically, intolerant, in the second they are separated, scattered, passive. The audience is a "crowd of lonely people". Irrationality, unpredictability are the characteristics of the crowd. As a rule, in a crowd, a person is primitivized.

Great Definition

Incomplete definition ↓

CROWD

a congestion of people deprived of a clearly perceived commonality of goals and organization, but interconnected by a similarity of emotional state and a common center of attention. There are four main types of crowds: a) occasional, bound by curiosity about an unexpected incident (traffic accident); b) conventional, associated with interest in pre-announced mass entertainment (certain types of sports); c) expressive, jointly expressing a general attitude to an event (joy, enthusiasm, protest, etc.); its extreme form is represented by an ecstatic crowd, which, as a result of mutual, rhythmically growing infection, reaches a state of general ecstasy (carnivals, mass religious rituals, rock music concerts, etc.); d) acting (aggressive - lynching, panic, acquisitive, revolutionary). The absence of clear goals, the absence or diffuseness of the structure give rise to the most important property of the crowd - its easy convertibility from one type to another. Such transformations often occur spontaneously, but knowledge of their typical patterns and mechanisms allows, on the one hand, to deliberately manipulate the behavior of the crowd for adventurous purposes, and on the other hand, to consciously prevent and stop its especially dangerous actions.

Crowd is a temporary accumulation of a large number of people in a territory that allows for direct contact, who spontaneously respond to the same stimuli in a similar or identical way.

The crowd has no established organizational norms and no set of moral precepts and taboos. What appears here are primitive but strong impulses and emotions.

The crowd is usually divided into four kinds:

• aggressive crowd;
• fleeing (escaping) crowd;
• the hungry crowd;
• demonstrating crowd.

In all these types of crowds, there are many common phenomena:

• deindividualization, i.e. partial disappearance of individual personality traits and a tendency to imitate;
• a sense of standardization, which entails a weakening of ethical and legal norms;
• a strong sense of the correctness of the actions taken;
• a sense of one's own strength and a decrease in the sense of responsibility for one's actions.

In the crowd, a person is involuntarily transmitted hyperexcitability about one's own social feelings, there is a multiple mutual amplification of the emotional impact. From here, in the crowd, even an accidentally thrown word that insults political preferences can become an impetus for pogroms and violence.

Unconscious anxiety for what has been done often exacerbates the feeling of persecution - a special excitability of the crowd towards their true or illusory enemies.

The influence of the crowd on the individual is transient, although the mood that has arisen in him may persist for a long time. The bond that binds the crowd is broken if new stimuli create different emotions:

• the crowd disperses under the influence of the instinct of self-preservation or fear (if the crowd is doused with water or fired upon);
• the crowd can also disperse under the influence of such feelings as hunger, a sense of humor, excitement directed to other goals, etc.

Methods of overcoming or psychological disarming of the crowd are built on the use of this kind of mental mechanisms, just as techniques are based on the knowledge of the mechanisms that unite the crowd, with the help of which the crowd is manipulated.

crowd formation

Crowd- a temporary and casual meeting of individuals of any nationality, profession and gender, regardless of the reason for this meeting. Under certain conditions, the participant in such an assembly - the "man of the crowd" - has completely new features that differ from those that characterize individual individuals. The conscious personality disappears, and the feelings and ideas of all the individual units that form the whole, called the crowd, take the same direction. A “collective soul” is formed, which, of course, is temporary, but the meeting in such cases becomes what the Frenchman G. Lebon (1841-1931) called an organized crowd or a spiritualized crowd, constituting a single being and subject to the law of the spiritual unity of the crowd.

Without a doubt, the mere fact of the chance occurrence of many individuals together is not enough for them to take on the character of an organized crowd; this requires the influence of some pathogens. According to the French sociologist and psychologist S. Moscovici, the masses are a social phenomenon: individuals "dissolve" under the influence of suggestion that comes from the leader. The social machine of massing people makes them irrational when people, irritated by some event, gather together and the conscience of individuals cannot restrain their impulses. The masses are carried away, spurred on by the leader (“the mad lead the blind”). In such cases, politics acts as a rational form of using the irrational essence of the masses. Having said "yes" to the leader, the exalted crowd changes its faith and is transformed. The emotional energy throws her forward and gives her the courage to endure suffering and at the same time insensitivity. The energy that the masses draw from their hearts is used by leaders to push the levers of government and lead many people to a goal dictated by reason.

"Social involvement" may be a factor that reinforces the behavioral component. For example, street riots, riots, pogroms and other similar aggressive mass actions activate individual attitudes (negative attitude towards the authorities, the police or any “hostile” group), which under normal conditions are manifested only in verbal assessments or moods. In such situations, an additional reinforcing factor is the phenomenon of emotional infection that occurs in large crowds of people, the crowd.

Characterizing the collective behavior and role, there are three types of formation of spontaneous groups:

Crowd, which is formed on the street about a variety of events (traffic accident, detention of the offender, etc.). At the same time, the element, being the main background for the behavior of the crowd, often leads to its aggressive forms. If there is a person capable of leading the crowd, centers of organization arise in it, which, however, are extremely unstable;

Weight- a more stable formation with fuzzy boundaries, which is more organized, conscious (rallies, demonstrations), although heterogeneous and rather unstable. In the masses, the role of organizers is more significant, who are not put forward spontaneously, but are known in advance;

Public, which usually gathers for a short time together in connection with some kind of spectacle. The audience is quite divided; its specific feature is the presence of a psychic connection and a single goal. Thanks to a common goal, the public is more manageable than the crowd, although an incident can turn its actions into uncontrollable (say, the behavior of fans in a stadium in the event of a loss to their favorite team).

Thus, under crowd understand a temporary and random meeting of people, characterized by a spiritual and emotional community, spatial proximity and the presence of an external stimulus. Weight - somewhat more stable and conscious education of individuals (for example, participants in a rally or demonstration); the organizers of the masses do not appear spontaneously, but are predetermined. public - this is a community of people who are consumers of the same spiritual and information product; unlike the crowd, the public is united not on a territorial, but on a spiritual basis. Spontaneous groups as a whole are a constant element of social life at all stages of its development, and their role in the development of many social processes quite significant.

Behavior of people in a socially unorganized community

Let us consider the essential features of an unorganized social community. A variety of such a community, along with the public and the masses, is the crowd.

The behavior of people in a crowd is different mental characteristics: there is some deindividualization of the personality, a primitive emotional-impulsive reaction dominates, the imitative activity of people is sharply activated, foresight is reduced possible consequences their actions. In crowd conditions, people exaggerate the legitimacy of their actions, their critical assessment decreases, the sense of responsibility becomes dull, and the feeling of anonymity dominates. Against the background of the general emotional stress caused by this or that situation, people entering the crowd quickly succumb to mental infection.

A person in a crowd acquires a sense of anonymity, of self-liberation from social control. Along with this, in the conditions of the crowd, the conformity of individuals sharply increases, their compliance with the models of behavior offered to the crowd. Thrill seekers easily enter the casual crowd. The so-called expressive crowd easily includes impulsive and emotionally labile people. Such a crowd is easily carried away by rhythmic influences - marches, chants, chanting of slogans, rhythmic gestures. An example of the behavior of this kind of crowd can be the behavior of fans in the stadium. An expressive crowd easily develops into an active crowd of an aggressive type. Her behavior is determined by hatred for the object of aggression and directed by random instigators.

Spontaneous behavior of people is provoked in a number of cases by spontaneous information - rumors. Rumors cover events not covered by the media mass media, are a specific type of interpersonal communication, the content of which is mastered by an audience subject to certain situational expectations and prejudices.

The regulatory mechanism of the behavior of the crowd - collective unconsciousness - is a special class of mental phenomena, in which, according to the ideas of the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, the instinctive experience of mankind is contained. Universal a priori behavioral patterns, transpersonal patterns of behavior suppress the individual consciousness of people and cause genetically archaic behavioral reactions, "collective reflexes", in the terminology of V. M. Bekhterev. Homogeneous, primitive assessments and actions unite people into a monolithic mass and sharply increase the energy of their one-act impulsive action. However, such actions become maladaptive in cases where the need for consciously organized behavior arises.

The phenomenon of the crowd, impulsive stereotypes of behavior are widely used by totalitarian politicians, extremists and religious fanatics.

The predominance of a one-sided interest in a social community can cause crowd-like patterns of behavior, a sharp demarcation into “us” and “them”, and the primitivization of social relations.

Behavioral characteristics vary four kinds of crowd:

• random (occasional);
• expressive (jointly expressing general affective feelings - jubilation, fear, protest, etc.);
• conventional (based on some spontaneously formulated positions);
• acting, which is divided into aggressive, panic (rescuing), money-grubbing, ecstatic (acting in a state of ecstasy), insurrectionary (outraged by the actions of the authorities).

Any crowd is characterized by a common emotional state and a spontaneously emerging direction of behavior; growing self-reinforcing mental infection - the spread of an increased emotional state from one individual to another at the psychophysiological level of contact. The absence of clear goals and the organizational diffuseness of the crowd turn it into an object of manipulation. The crowd is always in an extremely excited prelaunch, installation state; only an appropriate start signal is needed to activate it.

One of the types of disorganized behavior of the crowd is panic - a group conflict emotional state that arises on the basis of mental infection in a situation of real or imaginary danger, with a lack of information necessary for reasonable decision-making.

Panic blocks the ability to adequately reflect the situation and its rational assessment, people's actions become defensive and chaotic, consciousness narrows sharply, people become capable of extremely selfish, even antisocial actions. Panic occurs in a state of mental tension, in conditions of increased anxiety caused by the expectation of extremely difficult events (fire, famine, earthquakes, flooding, armed attack), in conditions of insufficient information about the sources of danger, the time of its occurrence and methods of counteraction. Thus, the inhabitants of one village, who were expecting an attack by Turkish troops, fell into a state of panic, seeing in the distance the reflections of the braids of their fellow villagers.

It is possible to bring the crowd out of a panic state only with a very strong counteracting stimulus, purposeful, categorical commands of authoritative leaders, presentation of brief soothing information and an indication of real opportunities way out of a critical situation.

Panic is an extreme manifestation of the spontaneous, impulsive behavior of people in the absence of their social organization, a state of mass passion that occurs in response to a shocking circumstance. The crisis situation creates the need for immediate action, and their conscious organization is impossible due to information-oriented insufficiency.

Using the example of people's behavior in a crowd, we see that the absence of a social organization, a system of regulated norms and ways of behavior leads to a sharp decrease in the socio-normative level of people's behavior. The behavior of people in these conditions is characterized by increased impulsiveness, subordination of consciousness to one actualized image, narrowing of other spheres of consciousness.

On Saturday, December 11, 2010, in the very center of the capital on Manezhnaya Square, according to law enforcement agencies, about 5 thousand young people gathered, representing various communities - from football fans to supporters of nationalist organizations. There was a mass brawl in which more than 30 people were injured. The reason for the riots was the murder on December 6 in a fight of a Spartak fan Yegor Sviridov. On Wednesday, December 15, the police prevented new riots in Moscow. Most of the people - according to preliminary estimates, about 1.5 thousand people - came to the square near the European shopping center next to the Kiev railway station. According to various sources, from 800 to 1.2 thousand people were detained in total. Among the detainees were minors.

On December 20, RIA Novosti hosted a round table on the topic: “Crowd Phenomena: “Among people close to me ... and strangers””. During the live broadcast, the experts examined the events on Manezhnaya Square from the point of view of the psychology of the crowd. The conversation was about the controllability of the crowd, about the danger that it brings to society and even to those people who are in it. A number of issues were raised. What, from the point of view of psychologists, happened on Manezhnaya Square? What unites people in a crowd - a collective mind or a common emotional state? Does anonymity imply irresponsibility and impunity? Can crowds be controlled? What dangers threaten society when the "collective unconscious" is in the service of manipulators? What is the psychological portrait of protest? What to fight when dealing with the crowd: with manipulators or with the collective unconscious? The event report is brought to your attention.

textbook picture “A textbook picture,” said Hakob Nazaretyan, editor-in-chief of the journal Historical Psychology and Sociology of History, and a leading researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, pointing to a photograph with protesters on Manezhnaya. From his point of view, all these people are a typical manifestation of an “aggressive crowd.” “This is not just an aggressive crowd,” Alexander Tkhostov, Doctor of Psychology, Head of the Department of Neuropsychology and Pathopsychology, Moscow State University, continued the topic. “There are different organizations there. There were different organizers. This is not quite a crowd in its purest form, ”he explained. “When it is already like this, some of its qualitative features change.” Commenting on the photos from Manezhnaya Square, Alexander Tkhostov drew attention to people in masks. “It would be appropriate to recall the experiments of F. Zimbardo on aggressiveness, when he noticed that those people who wear a mask show a much higher level of aggressiveness. At this point, people are deprived of responsibility for what they are doing, ”the specialist emphasized. In his opinion, in a certain sense, the crowd itself becomes a mask, in which a person dissolves. At this time, hidden desires, suppressed needs break out into the wild. Most often these are destructive manifestations - dissatisfaction, discontent, hatred, aggression. The collective mind is guided by one or two simple ideas. “The crowd is, in a sense, a mask. Anonymous people are deprived at this point of responsibility for what they do. They, like everyone else, do the same thing as everyone else. In doing so, they regress. But it would be wrong to assume that the crowd was organized at that very moment. At this moment, things appear that existed before, but did not find a way out: hatred, aggressiveness, discontent, the feeling that no one hears you, the desire to do something. There were not many ideas, one or two, and not that they were ideas, but rather chants or slogans. In a situation where there is a relief of social responsibility, such destructive things will certainly manifest themselves. ”In turn, the director of the Center for the Sociology of Education of the Russian Academy of Education, Doctor of Psychology Vladimir Sobkin noted that along with an attempt to hide in the crowd, today, in the age of new technologies, young people come to take a picture of yourself, show off under the camera lenses, and then share these photos with your friends. Many participants have a camera with them, a phone with which they shoot the events in which they participate. This way of fixing yourself in the author's action, when you are in the crowd, you belong to it and you fix it, remember it for yourself - this is a new moment of the mass behavior of the crowd in the situation of the information society, which appeared relatively recently. This was also observed during the shooting of the White House, when people recorded the assault "live", and the way teenagers behave in fights, when the violence is filmed and then broadcast on the network and through the media. A protest scenario in the form of an aggressive crowd and an aggressive way of behavior inside young Russians learned it through the media. The form of organization, the way of behavior, the symbolism of behavior are the language of mass protest, which is not invented today, but broadcast by the media in dozens and hundreds of variants that the participants saw on television. Nevertheless, according to Vladimir Sobkin, at Manezhnaya there was "an audience that already had the experience of mass experience, for many of them this is not the first time - experience in the crowd, in the mass with the removal of authorship." “In terms of language and ways of co-organization, there are things that are learned in the chants of football fans, etc., i.e. it is an audience that already has the experience of mass experience in the crowd. And with the removal of authorship, a paradox occurs: on the one hand, the desire to be in a mask, the desire to relieve oneself of individual responsibility, and on the other hand, to fix it as “where I participated, where I was.” He also noted that those young people who came to Manezhnaya Square belong to the generation that grew up in the difficult times of the 1990s. Very many of them came from dysfunctional families and do not see any serious prospects for themselves. Dmitry Orlov, Director General of the Agency for Political and Economic Communications, expressed the opinion that the crowd at Manezhnaya Street had its own emotional organizers - "ringleaders". Shouts at Manezhnaya "provided only a few people." He noticed that the crowd was not only aggressive, but also acquisitive: there were demands that were not related to aggression in behavior. The crowd was heterogeneous, there was a uniting group - the organizers and people who came from the action on Kronstadt Boulevard, as well as those who came on the call on the Internet and social networks, there were passers-by who accidentally saw the action and joined it. Orlov also noted one feature: “The crowd was devoid of an obvious public leader or leaders. I did not see people and organizations that publicly led the masses behind them and were ready to take public responsibility. And it's weird. No, the organizers, of course, were. But no one said: "I did it, and I take responsibility for it." Hakob Nazaretyan suggested not to look for the devil-organizer. He did not deny that there are always individual instigators of unrest, but he emphasized: “The most favorite and elementary method, as a rule, among journalists is the search for the devil. The devil did it, someone did it on purpose. But serious analytics is based on the presumption of spontaneity of what is happening. The devil appears in the analysis only at the last stage, when too much information indicates that there is someone's intentions behind everything. “Most often, such things are the result of the stupidity of the organizers and the inept actions of the authorities,” he said.A. Nazaretyan wondered why law enforcement agencies cannot control the crowd, but provocateurs can. “The crowd is diverse. The main property of the crowd is convertibility. It easily transforms from one species to another. The art of crowd control is the ability to transform it. This needs to be learned. OMON, of course, is good, it is also needed. But there is modern psychology, proven technologies that can reduce the level of violence. The crowd is a very primitive system. A crowd is much easier to manage than, say, an organization. A herd of cows is easier to manage than a ministry or a university. Another thing is that all this is non-linear: a good minister cannot become a good shepherd if he has never learned this. This must be learned. For 20 years, politicians from all over the world have been trained in Moscow to work with the crowd, to work with rumors. And now it turned out that no one in Moscow knows how to do this. Reducing everything to the riot police is not an option, irrational psychological methods must be applied to the crowd,” he said, recalling that “we are not trying to expel Napoleon’s army from Moscow, but our children.” Professor Nazaretyan also believes that if in the very At the beginning of all these incidents, there would have been psychologically prepared people, then subsequent violent events could have been avoided. “If trained people who know the psychology of mass behavior would join, then it would be quite possible to prevent extreme forms of behavior, and it would be possible to conduct a dialogue in a civilized manner.” The crowd can and should be controlled, the expert says. Director of the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry, Professor Valery Krasnov: “Assessment of the events on Manezhnaya Square shows that the crowd was not controllable - the elemental element prevailed. But keep in mind that the crowd was teenage. She is most capable of imitative actions and is not completely independent. Imitation is a property of adolescence. Children imitate adults, teenagers imitate themselves. If there is some aggressive nucleus in the crowd of teenagers, they will imitate and express aggression. If they are distracted by something unusual and extraordinary, then they can switch to this extraordinary moment and be distracted from aggression. Aggressiveness is manifested in adolescents due to their impulsiveness and tendency to imitate, to group. Teenagers have not yet matured as independent individuals, therefore, as a group, as a crowd, they are identified with a certain common beginning. I don't think teenagers are that controllable. They also have resistance. There is always a negative component in the behavior of adolescents; it is not so easy to force them to do something. But imitating someone, they can commit aggressive actions, relying on a model in the crowd. In addition, there are samples for them in the media.” “It would be wrong not to touch on the content of the protest,” V. Sobkin added. - What is the identification of the protest in this case? A sense of injustice brought people to the square: They were brought out by injustice, from their point of view, that happened. In this sense, people felt their unconditional rightness. Good moral and moral goals are another way to relieve yourself of responsibility for your behavior. ”But this is not an excuse for such actions,” Sobkin assures. - Here the bet was made on youthful maximalism. There is a phrase "a thief should be in jail." And they are guided by it. This is a clearly expressed manifestation of conformism (changing behavior and attitudes in accordance with the position of the majority). This is a controlled youth, controlled by slogans, a simple ideology that allows itself to be manipulated.” “You forget one more feeling - they have no other way to achieve justice,” Alexander Tkhostov stood up for the youth. - It remains only to go to the square. I was struck by the data of polls on the Internet - a large number of people supported those who went to Manezhnaya Square. In terms of control - also a controversial point. In the beginning, the crowd can be controlled, but when a herd of buffalo is already charging at you, I don’t know how you can control it. There are situations where even experienced people cannot do anything.” Xenophobia, nationalism, aggression is normal Hakob Nazaretyan recalled that on December 11, the protesters began to act according to the laws of primitive thinking, collective responsibility - they beat Caucasians who came to hand, those who simply outwardly look a little like the murderers of Yegor Sviridov. “The crowd is spontaneously transformable and the management here is spontaneous. Changeable moods, heterogeneity, when it occurs ... when this happens, horror stories begin - aggression, xenophobia and so on, - he said. - For me, as a psychologist, these are specific concepts and phenomena that can and should be worked with. There is no life without aggression. Without nationalism there is no nation. Without xenophobia, there is no immunity to foreign influences, there is no whole culture. Because culture is not only Mozart, Pushkin and Shakespeare. Culture is very heterogeneous and always includes many aspects. Cannibalism is also an element of culture, and war is an element of culture, and public floggings, and family violence.” “The question is what does “xeno” refer to - a stranger. Alien - is it the shape of the eyes, the color of the hair, or is it a behavior that is unacceptable for my culture? If a woman is beaten, this is unacceptable, no matter what nationality those who beat them may be. Even if it is accepted in their culture. Such xenophobia is normal. Her question is to destroy xenophobia. Without xenophobia, any culture will collapse. There can be no absolute tolerance. Absolute diversity is destruction. Therefore, in systems theory there are laws that limit this diversity. The question is how to channel this nationalism, xenophobia and aggression into a constructive direction. It is impossible in Russia and Europe to counteract the dominance of foreign people if the birth rate is not increased. If Russians give birth to one child each, and Caucasians, for example, to six or seven children, then after some time the Russians will cease to be the main nation. The question is how to reorient xenophobia so that young people do not shave their heads and wave brass knuckles, but on the birth rate. This is a matter of informational, economic, cultural policy.” “The crowd is a civilizational and evolutionary degradation, regression. There were teenagers and immature people. It is bad if they are treated only by force. This will encourage new teenagers to be aggressive because they imitate each other. We must think about raising culture, about stimulating and shaping cultural models among young people. When a person has formed, he is self-sufficient - he will not enter an aggressive crowd on his own. He may accidentally be in this crowd, but he will try to get out of there, because it disgusts him. Joining the crowd disgusts a self-sufficient person,” added prof. Krasnova. Nazaretyan objected: “Can’t a self-sufficient person afford some kind of joint dancing and festivities to express himself - this is also a crowd. We are talking about the forms of the crowd. The more self-sufficient people there are, the more difficult the transformation begins. Therefore, one of the methods is the introduction of special people into the crowd. Krasnov: I want not so much to object as to add. This is another aspect of social psychology - a society of people needs what Bakhtin, Turner defined as carnivalization, when the lower moments must somehow manifest themselves. Although a person is not only and not so much an aggressor, he is also a creator, but sometimes he needs a release. Sobkin: “I would not confuse this crowd with a carnival ritual and carnival action, where there is a clear social vertical, where there is a king and a jester, etc. It's a completely different structure. And when we call everything a crowd, it means that we do not see what is before our eyes. And before us is a completely different social manifestation, which has nothing to do with the carnival. It is only in its completion that it can be framed by carnival rituals. But if this turns into some kind of protest, then the action of removing symbols begins, turning over those symbols that were previously at the top. But I wouldn't call it a carnival any more.”D. Orlov: “I want to make a remark that, firstly, the current carnival in Venice and the carnival in Brazil are qualitatively different, and secondly, the carnival in its origin is a rather archaic form of self-expression. Of course, 300 years ago it was an uncontrollable crowd. Those institutions and forms of behavior that were developed there were consecrated by tradition over time, and the carnival underwent significant changes. And once the carnival stood in the same row as the Dance of St. Vitus, and the search for the country of Kakaniya, and mass flagellation. Sobkin: “But note that the carnival is a culture of laughter, hysterically laughter. There is nothing funny here.” A. Nazaretyan: “Let's remember the circumstances under which it happened then, during the famine, etc. The crowd is a specific concept, there is a classification of crowds and the mechanisms of their transformation are described: how the Dance of St. or acquisitive crowd, or mass panic. It's all described in detail. Therefore, it is wrong to say that this is a different phenomenon. It's a crowd, we just have to see different varieties and variations of the crowd." Psychology is not a crowd When, during a multimedia press conference, the specialists were shown the second story and photographs from the square near the Kievsky railway station, their assessments changed. Alexander Tkhostov doubted whether it was a crowd at all. In his opinion, it was more likely that they were people who had calculated and thought everything over, since they prepared weapons, planned the place of the fight in advance and gathered there. On December 15, there was not a spontaneous crowd at the Kievsky railway station, but organized groups, experts say. There were no spontaneous actions, as in the case of the crowd. There was obviously illegal activity. Caucasians and nationalist-minded youth went there with weapons, they were waiting for certain events and were ready to commit illegal actions. There was also a third group - onlookers. “It has always been, - Alexander Tkhostov stated. - "Bread and circuses" - a need known since ancient Rome. To look at blood, violence, murders - this is also in a person, no matter how disgusting it looks.” “There are not three sides here,” Academician Vladimir Sobkin is sure. - There was a fourth side - OMON and police. She was tested for strength. The measure of admissibility and possibility was tested, then, where will he go this fourth side. This is the main test of the conflict. This is a very important point." This means that real organizers were behind these events, experts concluded. Valery Krasnov expressed doubts about the effective controllability of the crowd: “Some kind of call, a spark of motivation, an impetus can be given from outside, but then the crowd is already unpredictable.” He was surprised by the words of one of the officials of the government of Dagestan, who called on the Caucasian youth to “act with mountain methods” in response to aggressive actions. “This shows that society has degraded,” the psychologist said. - Highland customs suggest a high level of culture. They have always lived in the Caucasus, observing the laws and moral principles. And such words are a simple appeal to the lower strata, which ignites the crowd. To the animal instincts of the crowd. It surprises me that people who are empowered call for action, choosing not the best in culture, but the worst. This is a call to the lower layers of the human psyche. What did he want to say? Self-judgment, he called for this. Krasnov also believes that society is not entirely healthy, but at the same time "everyone is silent about the ulcers of society." “We live in an era of change, change in Europe. Many omissions are related to the policies of many states associated with political correctness inflated to the limit - when everyone is silent about the sores of society, about the difficulties of adapting immigrants, trying not to notice obviously ugly phenomena, if they are somehow ethnically colored. ”Hakop Nazaretyan emphasized the need clearly distinguish: where the crowd is, and where there is not. In the first case (on Manezhnaya) there was a crowd, and there it was possible and necessary to apply specific irrational-psychological methods. In the second case (at the Kiev railway station), when the group specially gathered, guys from the Caucasus arrived - we are no longer talking about a crowd. When a pogrom in the market is called a crowd, this is already a misnomer. If we act with a group as with a crowd, we will get dysfunction. If we work with the crowd as with a group, we will again get dysfunction. He referred to three principles of behavior in the crowd, so as not to become a victim of it, which were developed by American instructors: 1) do not get into the crowd for free, 2) getting into the crowd, predict how to get out of it, 3) getting into the crowd by chance, imagine that you are at work.D. Orlov: “I would like to add that we probably will not see a pure “classical” crowd, because we live in the era of multimedia communications. And in the case of December 11, and in the case of December 15, we observe both the actions of the organizers and very large-scale campaigns on the Internet that encourage people to go there. Why did people come with weapons to the rally on December 15, which was prevented by law enforcement agencies? Because they were motivated to do this on a number of sites, in social networks. A very important task is to prevent the aggression and fascistization of the crowd through preliminary work. Including the closure of radical sites. The actions of the authorities and law enforcement agencies must move from the sphere of reaction to the sphere of prevention.” Until the Slavic element is enough All experts agreed on one thing - events like those that occurred on December 11 and 15 will be repeated more than once. Alexander Tkhostov: “There are always conflicts and there will be. They must be tracked and have a normal output. Everyone knew what they were talking about. Everyone was silent for a long time, no one took responsibility. If the people in power had taken responsibility, then all this could have been avoided.” “Here,” he said, “things appear that were not born at that moment, but existed and did not find manifestation - this is hatred, this is aggressiveness. The symptom cannot be treated. What we see is a symptom of the manifestation of a systemic disease of power and society, the absence of a social contract - what we are building, who has what responsibilities. Until this happens, there will be a war of all against all.” The main lesson to be learned from the December events is the recognition of a systemic error, Alexander Tkhostov is sure. There is a growing dissonance in relations between the government and society, people are gnawed by a sense of injustice, people are oppressed by the inability to express their opinion and get a response to it.Prof. Krasnov: “When we talk about trouble in society, we are not talking about material trouble. Children in very wealthy families can also be disadvantaged. Because they were abandoned. Fathers and mothers devoted themselves all these 20 years to earning a livelihood and savings. They forgot that the most valuable thing is family, loved ones. It is known from studies at school among adolescents that children in privileged institutions are very disadvantaged, very vulnerable. They can also form a crowd. For this, simple ideas are enough for them: nationalistic, football and others, which they are guided by. They do not have a wide horizon, so that they have curiosity for foreign cultures, so that they have France, Russia and China.” What happened was a political confrontation, Academician Vladimir Sobkin noted. This is an expression of political protest. It is necessary to determine who these people are, what social groups and political forces participated in it. “These young people are a very complex generation,” he said. - Their parents lived through a difficult period associated with the collapse of the country and raised children. These are the children of dysfunctional families. Due to the growing social differentiation, they do not see any prospects, social lifts and opportunities for themselves. This is a very serious matter. It is necessary to work with groups that have perceived themselves and are experiencing themselves as socially unsuccessful groups. In this grasping for an ax, a club, a bat, I see the way out of social failure and the hopelessness of social prospects.” “The scenario of Manezhnaya Square will be repeated as long as the Slavic element is enough. And then the territory of Russia will be given to non-Slavs,” Professor Hakob Nazaretyan predicts. To avoid such a scenario and the accompanying bloody scenes, according to the expert, information, demographic and other government programs are needed. "Xenophobia, which will certainly develop, aggression, nationalism, normal, natural nationalism, must be directed like atomic energy - from a bomb to a power plant." According to RIA Novosti, 21.12.2010