Human beings are effected everyday by various environmental and social conditions for several reasons. The question is to determine why these events occur and why we think that way. Assume you are at a professional baseball game and get up to go to the concession stand to buy a hot dog. While you are gone, three men suddenly jump out of the stands and attack the first base coach. When you come back to your seat, you see the men being hauled away by the police. Since you missed the attack, you ask your friend what happened. He tells you what happened. You next ask, “Why did he do that?” He replies, “Because they are a bunch of idiots!” Later that night you are thinking about what happened and what your friend said. You begin to reflect upon the incident and come up with ideas, based upon social psychology, as to why the men have done what they did and why your friend said what he said. Based on this event you take into effect areas of deindividuation, group influence, miscellaneous factors, and fundamental attribution errors.
Deindividuation is a personal loss of self identity that happens frequently in groups of people. The person loses all of their beliefs to conform to the “norm” of the group they are a part of. The individuals are in a sense “brainwashed” into thinking one consistent belief in the heat of the moment. This could be a leading factor to why the men attacked the coach. Deindividuation would cause the men to forget about laws and standards and just allow them to react in an irrational way. The men could have gotten so frustrated with the game that they decided to work together and get their point across to everyone. This could have happened due to the first base coach not directing their favorite team in a fashion that they wanted. Many times we are stuck in this situation where we get so wrapped into an event or environment that we forget where we are and only focus on what we want. The men shared this same mentality by showing that they were going to attack the coach because they wanted him to do something differently.
Deindividuation might not be the reason but it is a factor to keep in mind. Another factor we should look at is group influence. The men could have been apart of a larger group and forced to attack the coach. Large groups tend to have a great amount of peer pressure built into them. The smaller group of men could have been peer pressured, by a some what larger group, into attacking a coach because they did not agree with what the coach was doing. The smaller group of men could also have been doing it as a peer pressured “dare” for attention. When outnumbered, it is possible that humans can become more susceptible to being forced into the wrong decisions. There are several factors to why people are pressured under group influence, but these reasons might not necessarily be the correction assumption.
There are several miscellaneous factors that could have led to the actions that the men engaged in. First being the influence of alcohol. Alcohol has a tendency to make your forget all your inhibitions. Baseball events sell alcoholic beverages and it is possible that the men could have had enough of a quantity of alcohol to get drunk. When drunk you are easily influenced by a group, or you come up with an outrageous idea that could be against the law. Whether or not it was alcohol, you can still keep that factor as a possibility. The score could also be another factor. If the score is going in your favor, you are least likely to become upset and in a form of aggression. The men’s team could have been loosing and they could have placed the blame on the first base coach. They got so wrapped up in aggravation over the score that they overreacted. The last factor you could think about is attention. A lot of people do irrational things to gain attention. This is a childish way to react but we see it all the time on sports games when a person will randomly run across the field and cheer. The men could have been bored and wanted to be “known” for something so they decided to go out with a bang so to speak. Each miscellaneous factor could possibly be linked to deindividuation or group influence as well to create a more vivid conclusion.
You then can sit and contemplate what your friend said about the men. All you can infer is that it could be apart of the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is a tendency to make an assumption about a person’s behavior or personality without knowing the situation first. Your friend used this error and jumped to the conclusion that they were “idiots” without keeping in mind what then men were thinking. He had no idea what the motive was for the men or what they were thinking. He should have kept in mind that people have different beliefs and opinions that differ from the ones he holds. It is possible that if your friend was in the same situation as the men were that he would react the same way. Instead of jumping to conclusions, he should have not blurted out a harsh response and consider why the men did what they did.
Based on this event you take into effect areas of deindividuation, group influence, miscellaneous factors, and fundamental attribution errors. There are many differences in the social psychological aspects as to why the men acted that way, as well as why your friend responded in the way he did. You will never come to terms as to why the events happened the way they did but you can reach several conclusions based on the various aspects of social psychology. Each situation should be evaluated by all angles before jumping to irrational conclusions.
