Credit: Flickr, Ian Broyles.
The thrill of the crowd derives from our basic social nature. If we humans hadn't cooperated and enjoyed each other's company over the course of evolution, we never would have survived. Crowds put us in touch with this deeply social dimension of our being.
At its best, the whole crowd experience is transcendent, connecting us with something larger and greater than ourselves. We will never sit in the same room with the millions of people who live in our country, but we get a feel for what that would be like when we go to a game together with 30-50,000 of them and experience what sociologist Emile Durkheim long ago called "collective effervescence," the bubbly, giddy feeling of group belonging.
This effervescent feeling is similar to looking at huge mountains, the ocean, or stars in the night sky. It's a kind of awe, a marveling at forces greater than the individual self. It lifts us up and makes our individual worries fade away for the moment. But instead of awe at a vast landscape or sky, the sports stadium induces awe at human actions and feelings: the sense that thousands of strangers are somehow connected by the athletic feats on display. It's like awe at a rock concert and the "mini-awe" feeling of human connection that we get when we throw coins in water fountains (as I argue here). These are all rituals that connect us to something larger than the individual self.
And the effects aren't just ethereal, abstract feelings. They're intimately connected with our brains and bodies. Scientists have explained how typical ritual elements like repetitive motion and rhythmic music alter the nervous system, biochemicals, and brain waves. These physical alterations occur at a sports game because there's plenty of such repetitive motion and music. Recent research on mirror neurons also helps explain what's going on. Mirror neurons fire in observers' brains as if they were doing the same action they're watching someone else perform. So this brain activity seems to explain why sports spectators get so caught up in the game. As one researcher said, "When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain" (NYT). In addition, I would like to think that the density of all those human bodies—which primarily consist of water, plus mild electrical activity in their brains—creates a sea of electrical conductivity in the stadium, so that there literally is electricity in the air.
Wrigley Field, Credit: Ttarasiuk, Flckr.
Obviously things sometimes get out of hand, but most sports crowds are remarkably well-behaved. Somehow 30-50,000 strangers routinely manage to enter the same space, sit inches from each other, eat and drink and shout, and then exit peacefully without so much as a broken fingernail. Critics who disdain sports crowds miss all this. Worse, they reject collective joy.
Crowds, in short, put us in touch with humanity. And that feels good.
Doing the original wave. Credit: Flickr, Roberta WB.
My Related, Short Article about Awe, Human Connections--and
Why We Throw Coins in Water Fountains:
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_do_we_throw_coins_in_fountains
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2 comments:
This is so true, what is it with crowds!...
Indeed, crowds can be wonderful...a sort of religious experience.
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