Explaining effervescence : investigating the relationship between shared social identity and positive experience in crowds
Abstract
We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these to be more likely when participants perceived crowd members to share a common collective identity. We investigated these predictions in a survey of pilgrims (N = 416) attending a month-long Hindu pilgrimage festival in north India. We found participants' perceptions of a shared identity amongst crowd members had an indirect effect on their positive experience at the event through (1) increasing participants' sense that they were able to enact their collective identity and (2) increasing the sense of intimacy with other crowd members. We discuss the implications of these data for how crowd emotion should be conceptualised.
Citation
Hopkins , N , Reicher , S D , Khan , S S , Tewari , S , Srinivasan , N & Stevenson , C 2016 , ' Explaining effervescence : investigating the relationship between shared social identity and positive experience in crowds ' , Cognition and Emotion , vol. 30 , no. 1 , pp. 20-32 . https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1015969
Publication
Cognition and Emotion
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0269-9931Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
This work was supported by the ESRC [grant number RES-062-23-1449].Collections
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