Friday 4 November 2011

Beware of pop psychology!

A recent TV programme on the UK's Channel 4 by Derren Brown claimed to be doing an experiment that helps show why people become 'de-individuated' in riots and do bad things. Needless to say it's a load of pop psychology rubbish based on out-dated theories that are completely rejected by current crowd psychologists. I had hoped that Derren might know better, as he has previously cited work that we have done on crowd behaviour, but why let current scientific evidence get in the way of TV ratings!

Some colleagues have done an excellent response to this awful programme, which is available at;

http://crowdpsych.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/derren-brown%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98crowd-experiment%E2%80%99-a-response-from-two-social-psychologists/#comments

Or
http://nirmukta.com/2011/11/07/derren-brown%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98crowd-experiment%E2%80%99-a-response-from-two-social-psychologists/

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