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By Root 1013 0

—they are doing so, at least in part, in response to what other people are doing. The greater the number of individuals who engage in a riot, the more likely their efforts will force the politicians to pay attention, and the less likely that any one of them will be caught and punished. Also, riots have a primal energy of their own that can undermine otherwise strong social conventions against physical destruction, even skewing our psychological estimation of risk. In a riot, even sensible people can go crazy. For all these reasons, the choice about whether to remain calm or to engage in violence is subject to the general rule that the more other people are rioting, the more likely any particular individual is to join in.

Nevertheless, in this crowd, as everywhere, individual people have different tendencies toward violence. Perhaps those who are better off or who are less affected financially by the new policy are less inclined to risk jail time to make a point. Others are more persuaded that violence, although regrettable, is a useful political device. Some may have an unrelated gripe against the police or the politicians or society, and this event is giving them an excuse to vent. And perhaps some of them are just crazier than others. Whatever the reason—and the reasons can be as many and as complicated as you can imagine—each individual in the crowd can be thought of as having a “threshold,” a point at which, if enough other people join in the riot, they will too, but below which they will refrain. Some people—the “rabble rousers”—have very low thresholds, while others, like the president of the student society, have very high thresholds. But everyone has a threshold of social influence, above which they will “tip” from calm to violence. This might seem like a strange way to characterize individual behavior. But the benefit of describing people in the crowd in terms of their threshold is that the distribution of thresholds over the whole crowd, from crazy (“I will riot even if no one else does”) to Gandhi (“I will not riot even if everyone else does”) turns out to capture some interesting and surprising lessons about crowd behavior.12

To illustrate what could happen, Granovetter posited a very simple distribution in which each of the hundred people has a unique threshold. Exactly one person that is, has a threshold of zero, while another has a threshold of one other person, another has a threshold of two other people, and so on all the way up to the most conservative person, who will join in only after all ninety-nine others have. What will happen? Well, first Mr. Crazy—the one with the threshold of zero—will start throwing things, apropos of nothing. Then, his sidekick with the threshold of one (who needs only one other person to riot before joining in) joins him. Together, these two troublemakers prompt a third person—the guy with the threshold of two—to join in as well, and that’s enough to get the threshold-three person going, which is enough to … well, you get the idea: Given this particular threshold distribution, the entire crowd ends up joining the riot, one after the other. Chaos reigns.

Imagine, however, that in the next town over, a second crowd of students, of exactly the same size, has gathered for exactly the same reason. As unlikely as it may sound, let’s imagine that this crowd has almost exactly the same distribution of thresholds as the first one. So closely matched are these two crowds, in fact, that they differ with respect to just one person: Whereas in the first crowd each person had a unique threshold, in this one nobody has a threshold of three, and two people have a threshold of four. To an outside observer, this difference is so minute as to be undetectable. We know they’re different because we’re playing God here, but no feasible psychological test or statistical model could tell these two crowds apart. So what happens now to the crowd’s behavior? It starts out the same: Mr. Crazy leads off just as before, and his sidekick and the guy with a threshold of two join in like clockwork. But then