Pod Insights All In The Mind Do people really behave differently in a crowd? About this episode Panicky. Irrational. Impulsive. These are the traits that have long been associated with crowd behaviour.
But modern crowd science suggests that’s an incomplete, if not inaccurate picture.
From crowd crushes to terrorist attacks, we take a closer look at how people really behave in crowds, and what you can do to keep yourself safe in one.
Want to listen to more All in the Mind? Check out our episode, Can music inspire mania? https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/can-music-inspire-mania-lisztomania/103944402
Guest:
Associate Professor Milad HaghaniPrincipal Fellow in Urban Resilience & MobilityUniversity of Melbourne
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Roi HubermanMore info:
How simple behavioural modifications can influence evacuation efficiency of crowds: Part 1. Decision making of individuals https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X24002845How simple behavioural modifications can influence evacuation efficiency of crowds: Part 2. Physical movement of individuals https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X24002833How behavioural changes in social groups affect evacuation efficiency of crowds https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753524002698Contemporary understanding of riots: Classical crowd psychology, ideology and the social identity approach https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963662516639872The role of social identity processes in mass emergency behaviour: An integrative review https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10463283.2018.1471948English riots 2011: new research shows why crowd behaviour isn't contagious https://theconversation.com/english-riots-2011-new-research-shows-why-crowd-behaviour-isnt-contagious-83454How to stay safe in a New Year's Eve crowd https://theconversation.com/how-to-stay-safe-in-a-new-years-eve-crowd-239200
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07 Speaker 01 There is this longstanding idea that when people get in a crowd, when they're among a mass of other people, they get more irrational.
0:18 Speaker 02 By the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual. In a crowd, he is a barbarian.
0:34 Speaker 01 Wow.
0:35 Speaker 02 That is, a creature acting by instinct.
0:39 Speaker 01 These are the hugely influential words of Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist working in the late 1800s, early 1900s, who is considered the father of crowd psychology.
0:51 Speaker 02 Basically, what he theorised is that by the sheer fact that people are in a crowd of people, they lose the sense of self. And he later on concluded that because of this, crowds are basically trouble in the making.
1:07 Speaker 01 It's an idea that's reverberated through history.
1:12 Speaker 02 Le Bon has had many fans amongst dictators. Mussolini was a fan, for example. And he has said here and there in writing that he has learnt a lot about crowd behaviour by studying the book that Gustave Le Bon wrote. So because of this, Le Bon is often referred to as the father of crowd psychology. But it's safe to say that crowd psychology has not had the best father.
1:40 Speaker 01 But was Gustave Le Bon wrong? Like, aren't crowds sometimes dangerous? How does crowd psychology really work?
1:48 Speaker 02 Nowadays, we know much more about crowd behaviour. There are modern day social psychology theories that have debunked the theory of Le Bon. And we know much about crowd behaviour that is more connected to reality.
2:03 Speaker 01 This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, from the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, to the London bombings in 2005, to the Halloween crowd crush in Seoul, South Korea in 2022. We find out what modern research tells us about how crowds really behave and how to keep yourself safe in one.
2:30 Speaker 02 Many authoritarian figures in the history have resonated basically with Gustave Le Bon's message.
2:38 Speaker 01 Why did he hate crowds so much? Where was he getting these ideas from? Do you know?
2:43 Speaker 02 It's speculative, my answer, but I think it's just a dog whistle to the authoritarians of the time.
2:50 Speaker 01 Right.
2:51 Speaker 02 You know how sometimes us researchers say something to appease politicians so we get funding?
2:56 Speaker 01 Right.
2:57 Speaker 02 I think this could be something equivalent with the provisions of the time, whatever it was, whatever advantage he was going to get, because he knew that would be a dog whistle to them.
3:06 Speaker 01 Yeah. This is Malad Hagani, an associate professor of urban mobility at the University of Melbourne. And he says more than a century later, Gustave Le Bon's assumptions about crowds still turn up in decision making by leaders.
3:20 Speaker 02 Prime examples of that, we can trace to the management of the COVID-19 disaster in the United States.
3:28 Speaker 03 And I don't want people to be frightened. I don't want to create panic, as you say.
3:34 Speaker 02 If you remember, Donald Trump did an interview with Bob Woodward about the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, where he was asked, "You knew about the serious danger of the pandemic months earlier than you took actions. Why did you not warn people earlier?" And the response he gave was that, "I did not want people to panic."
3:58 Speaker 03 We don't want to instill panic. We don't want to jump up and down and start shouting that we have a problem.
4:06 Speaker 01 Right.
4:07 Speaker 02 And that speaks to the same line of ideas that has been borrowed from Le Bon's theory, that the sheer fact that people have the information can make them impulsive and irrational and can make them act panicky. And that has been time and time again, used as an excuse to withhold information from people at times of emergencies.
4:34 Speaker 01 Now, that idea about not wanting to cause panic, that's not totally without merit. Some research has shown that emotions like anxiety, fear, and panic can spread in a contagion-like effect. But Millad also makes the point that sometimes what's dismissed as panic is really just people acting quite rationally in threatening circumstances. More on that a bit later. But here's just one other thing I want to clarify. If we go back to Gustave Le Bon's original writing in his book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, to be fair, Millad says it's possible Le Bon was really just thinking about rioters and mobs when he developed his ideas. But he says that nuance wasn't elucidated.
5:20 Speaker 01 The way Le Bon wrote his views, simply being in a crowd of any sort made individuals prone to losing rationality and acting impulsively. But there are all kinds of examples in the century or so since he was writing that show us this isn't the whole picture.
5:38 Speaker 02 One of the most contemporary psychological theories that explain the behavior of crowds is the social identity theory that explains when people are in a crowd, not in just a physical crowd, a crowd that has some sense of shared identity. It creates a sense of in-group versus out-group, and that can moderate their behavior. That is why you see the sense of rivalry in soccer stadiums, for example, in the UK. That can explain crowd behavior better than the sheer fact that just because people are in crowds, they act irrationally. But also, it's got implications for the management of emergencies. As I mentioned, not every crowd has a sense of shared identity. If you are waiting for your train in the morning,
6:23 Speaker 02 peak hour, on a platform that is very crowded, you do not necessarily have a sense of shared identity with other people. However, if something of risky nature happens in that moment, all of a sudden, a crowd that is of purely physical nature, the crowd becomes a social crowd. The sheer fact that they are in a dangerous situation together, it creates a sense of shared social identity that has been documented in relation to many mass emergencies.
6:54 Speaker 04 Good evening, this is Peter Cave with a special edition of PM. There have been a series of explosions on the London Underground and there are also...
7:01 Speaker 02 In particular, for example, in relation to the 2005 London bombing that had affected commuters in the morning peak hour.
7:09 Speaker 05 In the past five minutes, I've seen a line of about 20 people walk past me who are walking wounded, people with cuts all over their face, some blood dripping down their faces and bandages.
7:19 Speaker 01 During the 2005 London bombings, four suicide bombers attacked the city's transport network. Three bombs went off on the Underground and a fourth on a double-decker bus. Fifty-two people were killed that day, July 7th, and nearly 800 others were injured.
7:36 Speaker 02 Retrospective interviews and research with the survivors of the attack has shown that people not only did not act selfishly and irrationally, rather, they made conscious decisions to help and to assist other individuals and basically acted in ways that are completely opposite to the notion that people in an emergency lose their mind. And this is not an isolated example. In relation to many other cases of emergencies, this has been documented that a physical crowd can suddenly become a social crowd that has a sense of shared identity. And that is a more modern way of viewing the crowds
8:21 Speaker 02 and how it can be managed in times of emergencies. It has created the sense that crowds can be looked upon as allies that can assist in times of emergencies, as opposed to an element that needs to be controlled or an element that needs to be denied information at times of emergency on the assumption that if they have the information, they are going to panic and that is going to be bad outcome.
8:46 Speaker 01 Hmm, so the London bombings is a really positive example of crowd behaviour, what can happen. But you talked also about soccer crowds. You know, we've seen a lot of soccer gatherings descend into hooliganism. What's the difference there?
9:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, one of the most challenging crowds, obviously, can be found in football stadiums, in soccer stadiums in the UK. And the modern-day social identity theory has also helped UK authorities and especially the UK police to change the way they approach crowds. When you look back at... Twenty to thirty years ago, there were a lot of crowd disasters happening every few years in the stadiums in the UK. The Hillsborough disaster is the most prominent one.
9:32 Speaker 06 I see people lying down, I see people there shaking their heads, St John's ambulance people there.
9:37 Speaker 01 If you're not familiar with that event, it is the deadliest disaster in British sports history. More than thirty ambulances ferried the dead and wounded to surrounding hospitals. It happened in nineteen eighty-nine at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, during an FA Cup semi-final. Ninety-seven people, men, women and children, died in a crowd crush that developed.
9:59 Speaker 07 The victims were killed when a big crowd at the FA Cup semi-final surged in packed terraces.
10:05 Speaker 02 Since then, the approach in managing crowds has significantly changed and has been aligned with the modern-day crowd psychology. And that is thanks to the effort of some of the social psychologists that are crowd experts and are based in the UK, who have helped sharing these ideas with the UK police. And they have shifted, basically, from a heavy-handed approach of crowd control to seeing crowds as allies and managing the crowds in a form that is more of a dialogue, in an understanding that they are not dealing with trouble necessarily, but the way they approach the crowd can create trouble as a result of their actions.
10:44 Speaker 01 That is essentially what happened in the Hillsborough disaster. An inquest later concluded that some police and stewards were so focused on preventing possible hooliganism that their actions made things worse. They penned fans into tight packs as a way to prevent possible trouble, which had the effect of trapping people in a confined space. Why didn't he give us the big ends? Because they knew we had more supporters, let supporters suffer like that. Why?
11:14 Speaker 01 ...fences, a standard feature at all British grounds, were the cause of many of the ninety-four deaths as people were crushed against them. Milan says a lot of lessons were learned from the events that transpired that day, and as a result, we haven't seen disasters like Hillsborough in the UK since.
11:31 Speaker 02 However, some other countries might not have necessarily kept up with the science. The most prominent example is the crowd disaster that we had in twenty twenty-two in Indonesia, for example, where tear gas was used in the stadium, even though FIFA bans using the tear gas in the stadiums. And that resulted in a lot of behaviour that would not have otherwise shown by the crowd. People getting stuck at the exit doors and getting caught in a bottleneck that eventually led to the death of many people.
12:04 Speaker 01 In that more recent crowd crush, at least one hundred and twenty-five people died.
12:09 Speaker 06 Police say the gate was partially open, allowing for a frenzied scrum of hundreds to exit only one or two at a time.
12:16 Speaker 02 So that approach, that heavy-handed crowd control, top-down view approach, is still being practised in some parts of the world, and we do still see the disastrous outcomes.
12:29 Speaker 01 So basically, how authorities treat crowds can influence how they behave?
12:33 Speaker 02 Absolutely. You need to understand the sense of shared identity, the sense of us-ness. You know, when you are in a crowd where you feel a sense of shared identity with others, one unfair action by a police member, for example, can create a sense of hostility, because other crowd members would see that as an offence to themselves as well. Of course, in cases of unlawful behaviour, actions need to be taken. However, the unnecessary provocation of the crowd, as soon as something happens, deploy the tear gas, for example. That is going to escalate the situation. So the art of de-escalation is being practised
13:17 Speaker 02 in some areas of the world, not necessarily in some other areas. And as a result of that, we see the differential outcomes.
13:29 Speaker 01 But we do also know that emotions are contagious. Isn't that partly what plays out on a large scale in crowds when things go wrong?
13:38 Speaker 02 Not necessarily, not necessarily. Yes, emotions are contagious, but not in the way that it's been framed in old fashioned socio-psychological theories, not in the way that it results deaths. Yes, when something happens that lifts up the mood of a crowd, we might get some extra level of happiness by seeing our fellow soccer fans being happy. That's some sort of contagion effect. However, this effect has not been documented to have resulted in any of the crowd disasters. The disaster in Itaewon, Seoul, for example.
14:18 Speaker 01 Anger is growing over why officials didn't have a plan to manage the expected crowds. 100,000 revelers jammed the streets surrounding the narrow alley. That disaster is a crowd crush that developed on Halloween in 2022, when tens of thousands of mostly young people arrived in a part of Seoul called Itaewon, which is a nightlife district. More than 150 people were killed, and three police officers were later imprisoned for professional negligence. With a court ruling, the disaster could have been prevented or minimized if police had prepared properly for the number of people that were expected that night.
14:56 Speaker 02 It did not happen because the panic spread throughout the crowd. It was the opposite. People found themselves in a very stressful situation, and as a result, they got anxious. But it was not the anxiousness of the crowd that caused the situation. It was not the spread of anxiousness through contagion effect that caused the situation either.
15:18 Speaker 01 Why is that so key? You've kind of touched on it, but why is it so key to understand that order of events? It's not anxiety and panic that causes the issues. It's the circumstances, the physicality of the space they're in, the action of authorities that then leads to these emotions.
15:35 Speaker 02 Well, the immediate consequence of this type of framing is that it stops you from getting to the root causes of the problem. Because if the default assumption is that people die in crowds because they act rationally, because they panic, then that exonerates authorities from looking back at what they did during that event that resulted in the deadly consequences that they observed.
16:03 Speaker 01 Right.
16:04 Speaker 02 And that has major consequences for future planning of crowds, for future practices. And it basically stops us from learning about the lessons that are hidden in these types of disasters.
16:20 Speaker 01 This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, challenging our assumptions about crowd behavior. Malad Hagani is an associate professor of urban mobility at the University of Melbourne. He says while panic, anxiety, and emotion don't in themselves produce crowd crushes, a view that is shared by many other experts in crowd behavior, there are certain characteristics of a crowd that can make them more prone to a crush developing. And one type of riskier crowd is a religiously motivated crowd.
16:57 Speaker 02 There are many reasons for that. Religious crowds are highly motivated. They need to do an act of worship. They need to do some form of, for example, dipping in the water, getting themselves to the location, depending on what type of religious gathering we are talking about, whether it is Hajj, or the Ekumbamela, or other religious events. So they are highly motivated. And when you are in that mindset, you are willing, as an individual, to accept a higher level of risk in the hope of getting the outcome that you want. And when you're dealing with a very, very large number of highly motivated people like
17:37 Speaker 02 this, you face a great deal of risk and uncertainty, and it's a type of crowd that becomes really difficult to protect, basically.
17:47 Speaker 01 A very quick explainer if you're unfamiliar. Hajj is the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Attendance is often capped, but about 2 million people attend each year. The Kumela is a Hindu festival and pilgrimage. It changes location each year, rotating between four different sites, each of which are tied to a river that's considered sacred. And it's actually the world's biggest gathering, drawing tens of millions of people.
18:15 Speaker 02 And it's a type of crowd that becomes really difficult to protect because of the fact that they see their act for a noble and justified cause and they are happy to take risk for it. And these usually happen in open space areas, not in indoor areas that are structured. And that also adds to the complexity of managing who is going to what direction and who is going to do what. It is not for the lack of preparation and precaution. During the Hajj, you see a lot of precautionary measures in place. During this year's Kumela, there was no element of technology that was not in place to prevent these kind of crowd disasters. AI, cameras that are equipped with AI analysis
19:00 Speaker 02 and can communicate to a control room center. All of that was in place and it still could not prevent deadly consequences that we saw during the event.
19:11 Speaker 01 This year, at least 30 people died at the Kumela, which ran from mid-January to late February.
19:19 Speaker 01 But you're saying if those crowd control strategies, even using AI, couldn't stop crushes in places like the Kumela, what extra precautions or planning are needed to keep religiously motivated crowds safe?
19:34 Speaker 02 That is an excellent question, and that brings me to the modern way of keeping crowds safe and the way that I try to advocate for in my research as well. So we have the traditional top-down approach of managing and controlling crowd. We know that that is not necessarily the solution because there is so much... Authorities can do when crowd disasters are in the making. In those kind of situations, the actions of people can make a difference. They can understand the risk if they can come up with subtle actions that would mitigate the risk, that can change the outcome. And that is something that I quite heavily pursue in my research as well.
20:19 Speaker 01 In his research, Malad has looked extensively at how people can be equipped with strategies to keep them safe and which strategies work best. Over the years, he's done research using computer simulations as well as running experiments with real people. Let me describe one series of experiments that he conducted over four days in September 2022. So what he did was gather about 250 recruits at the University of New South Wales campus in an event space with eight-meter-high ceilings. That was key, so his cameras could clearly record the movements of people on the ground.
20:59 Speaker 01 Now, Malad and his team used cardboard to create pretend walls and hallways, carving up that big space into rooms, so to speak, so participants had a more confined space to operate in. In one of the many scenarios he tested out, Malad gave about 20% of the crowd a specific instruction on how to exit.
21:23 Speaker 02 So it could be something as simple as, instead of following the majority of people in your navigational decisions, try to follow the minority of people. Or instead of being rigid in your decision-making, try to be more flexible in your navigational decision-making.
21:39 Speaker 01 One question, was there just one exit for people to get out of, or were there multiple exits?
21:44 Speaker 02 Each experiment has its own setup. It was rarely the case that there was only one exit, because you need to introduce certain levels of complexity and room for people to make navigational decisions, basically. And then the same task gets repeated again for a couple of times, and you see later on in the data that the system Same system became a little more efficient. And then you do the same thing with another 20% of the crowd. The system becomes a little further efficient.
22:12 Speaker 01 When you say efficiency, do you mean the crowds were exiting the building more quickly or more safely?
22:18 Speaker 02 That's one of the key metrics. Yes, that's one of the key. There are a range of metrics that you can use in order to assess the safety of crowds. How efficiently and how quickly, for example, they discharge a venue is one thing. The number of near collisions that they have. There are a range of indicators you can use, but they usually align with each other. So when one improves, the other ones also improve as well. And then you realize that once 50 to 60% of the crowd is equipped with a good decision-making strategy, the crowd is already gaining the full benefit that they can.
22:52 Speaker 01 He gives the analogy of vaccinations. If a certain number of people are inoculated, you get herd immunity. Same thing kind of happens here. And so here are the messages or strategies that he found were most effective for helping the crowd exit safely.
23:08 Speaker 02 If people had the mindset that when navigating the crowd, they should follow the direction that the minority of people are going to, that had a positive impact on the system. Because that means a more even distribution of the crowd across the system. If people were more open to change their navigational decisions when they face crowdedness, as opposed to saying that, no, we have chosen this direction and we are going this direction, that had a positive impact on the efficiency of the system.
23:38 Speaker 01 And in situations where he simulated an emergency exit.
23:42 Speaker 02 People reacting to the risk quickly and not hesitating, that had a positive impact on the system.
23:50 Speaker 01 You might think that last one is a bit strange, like, duh, people would leave quickly in an emergency situation. But there are countless real world examples that tell us often people will hesitate, whipping out their phones to record whatever is happening instead of immediately leaving. One of Malad's most interesting findings, though, is how to get families or other groups to evacuate more safely.
24:15 Speaker 02 When you have a crowd of solo individuals and compare it to the same size of the crowd that is composed of families and friends, the second one is far less efficient.
24:26 Speaker 01 Is that because people want to stick together?
24:28 Speaker 02 That's the whole root cause of it. But how can that be fixed?
24:31 Speaker 01 People aren't going to leave their children behind if they're in a crowd.
24:34 Speaker 02 They're not going to leave their children behind. You cannot ask people to separate. These kind of strategies have to be sensible, have to be easy to remember, and have to be practical. People have to accept them, otherwise they are useless.
24:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:47 Speaker 02 I tested this strategy, for example. I asked people to hold their hands, the groups of families or simulated families, and do not let go of each other's hands. And that did not help the crowd at all. In fact, it made it a little bit worse. But then I said, this time, instead of holding hands, you hold the back of another group member's clothes. Basically, form a line, form a snake. And once they did that, the whole inefficiency introduced by the presence of social groups disappeared, and some more efficiency was gained. The crowd even became more efficient than a crowd of solo individuals. And that gave me just the idea that these strategies that we need to communicate to people, they don't need to be so complex.
25:33 Speaker 02 They can be ad hoc strategies that can even be communicated to the crowd on the side as something is happening. This is not something that takes too many words to communicate to people.
25:45 Speaker 01 That strategy worked because groups basically took up less space if they moved towards the exits in a line formation. So is this something you should do in real life if you find yourself in a crowd with your family or friends? Well, Malad says it would work best if everyone or a significant portion of the crowd was also informed of the strategy and was also deploying it. But even if that's not the case, it can still be a useful strategy for exiting quickly and together.
26:18 Speaker 01 So based on your own research and whatever other research exists on this kind of thing, for people listening who are wondering, you know, if they find themselves in a crowd, what they should do, what would your advice be?
26:31 Speaker 02 Some of the most generic ones could be to read the room and the congestion being built in the space around them. That is for the prevention of crowd crushes, basically. And if they see that the density of the crowd is going up without any control, best thing you can do is to remove yourself from that situation and try to stay somewhere else before joining that crowd that is getting denser and denser. That could be one thing. If you're navigating yourself in a highly crowded situation, try to be open-minded about revising your decision. If you see that in this direction, the crowd is getting really heavy and there is an alternative way of exiting, even if it's a little bit
27:15 Speaker 02 further and it requires you to walk for longer. If people have that mindset, the entire crowd becomes more efficient and I have tested that.
27:24 Speaker 01 And if you happen to find yourself in an emergency situation, he says, don't stop to whip out your phone and record what's going on. Get out of there immediately. How much are crowd crushes a risk here in Australia? We've talked about a lot of examples from overseas. How much is this a worry in Australia?
27:44 Speaker 02 So now we are lucky in that one. We have a really good crowd safety culture overall, according to my observations. People are relatively good and crowd safety savvy. They are patient. They do not necessarily behave impatiently when they find themselves in a slow-moving crowd. And also, on the management side, our venue operators, our local councils, they are really safety savvy and they are keeping in touch with the latest science. That is a really positive thing that can keep us hopeful. However, that doesn't mean that we get to become complacent because we have had near miss accidents in
28:25 Speaker 02 Australia. Especially of concern is New Year's Eve celebrations in our major cities, including Melbourne and Sydney. I've made an example of religious crowds and how they are motivated, and that creates additional elements of risk. The New Year's Eve crowds are also somehow comparable, not that they are religiously motivated, but there are elements that translate into, by and large, similar behaviour. Imagine crowds of several hundreds of thousands of people, and there is one particular moment during the night, and that's the fireworks. And after that, the crowd is not interested. Everybody wants to go home.
29:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:04 Speaker 02 And they are highly motivated to go home because they think that transport options could be limited. That is why I described the dynamic somehow similar to religiously motivated crowds.
29:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:16 Speaker 02 And that creates a high level of risk. And over the last few years, we have seen cases where we got close to accidents.
29:24 Speaker 01 One example is a crush that started to develop in Sydney just before midnight on New Year's Eve in 2022. The crowd surged towards a vantage point for a better view of the fireworks, pushing through an open security gate and into a ticketed area in the rocks. Thankfully, security guards quickly managed to contain the situation, and no one was injured.
29:47 Speaker 02 And we have been very lucky that these accidents have not translated into deadly outcomes. And as a result, it has created a certain level of consciousness around keeping the crowds during the New Year's Eve safe.
29:58 Speaker 01 So while we are pretty lucky here in Australia, Malad's main takeaway is that safety is a shared responsibility.
30:07 Speaker 02 It is not just the responsibility of organisers and authorities. It is also our responsibility as well to be vigilant. In fact, our vigilance makes a bigger difference in terms of safety outcomes. And being safety savvy and vigilant does not mean that it's something that can ruin our experience. No, it can be something very subconscious, just having these things that we just discussed in the back of our minds. That can make a huge difference in how us as individuals and also people around us are kept safe in crowded environments.
30:45 Speaker 01 That is Malad Hagani from the University of Melbourne. We'll link to a bunch of his research and other studies as well on crowd behaviour in our show notes and on our website if you're interested in learning more.
30:59 Speaker 01 And that's it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr and senior producer James Bullen. Our sound engineer this week was Roi Huberman. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.
31:16 Speaker 01 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
Previous Why do we love collecting? Next Managing your emotions so they don't manage you Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated