Stanley Cup Riots: It Ain’t Just The ‘Bad Apples’

By: Anoosha Avni, Ph.D.
Registered Clinical Counsellor

Many people seem to believe that losing the final game of the Stanley Cup playoffs, along with drug and alcohol consumption and a few ‘bad apples,’ were the cause of the riots. While these factors contributed to the events following the Boston Bruins’ 4-0 victory over the Vancouver Canucks on June 15^th, 2011, the reasons are more complex and require an understanding of three key psychological concepts to help explain why otherwise law-abiding citizens would either engage in harmful and illegal behaviour or do nothing to stop it.

The first concept is deindividuation, which is the loss of individuality that occurs when a person becomes submerged in a group and feels relatively anonymous. We see this frequently in sporting events when fans paint their faces, wear masks, and adorn their favourite team’s jerseys. The anonymity of face paints and masks allows for the loss of a sense of individual responsibility and may encourage a person to participate in acts they would not normally engage in if they were alone. Personal identity and self-awareness are lost in a group and are replaced by the identification with the goals and actions of the group. The power of deindividuation is so strong that cell phone cameras and videos, which would be considered as obvious deterrents, do not prevent group participation in destructive and illegal acts.

 

Emotional contagion, the second concept, is the tendency to automatically copy and synchronize emotional expressions, postures, vocalizations, and movements of another person. The emotions triggered in a crowd are very powerful. During the 2010 Winter Olympics, the excitement and exhilaration was shared by virtually everybody in the crowds gathered in downtown Vancouver. Wednesday’s riots, however, shows how susceptible some people are to catching anger and fury fuelled by a small number of individuals. 

Finally, bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility dictate that the more witnesses are present, the less likely it is that anybody will intervene. People tend to think that somebody else will intervene, which makes it less likely that they would stop laws or social norms from being broken. Not only is there not much safety in numbers, but an individual’s perception of his or her responsibility also affects his or her interpretation of the event. If a bystander thinks that setting vehicles on fire or assaulting a fan of the rival team is a nonemergency, they are unlikely to intervene. While there certainly were individuals who attempted to stop looters and break up fights, the vast majority of the crowd didn’t attempt to intervene when they saw people looting stores, being physically assaulted, or cars being set on fire. Many looked on or tried to capture these images on their cell phone cameras. 

It’s easy to blame the ‘bad apples’ for the destruction and injuries caused during the riots yet doing so undermines the powerful psychological factors that make otherwise law-abiding citizens participate in harmful and illegal acts or, more commonly, stand by and do nothing.