Crowd psychology and the politics of co-production: Social control, democratic order and the consequences of theory

Abstract

Social psychology has long claimed neutrality in its explanations of collective behaviour, yet its foundational theories of crowds have repeatedly been co-produced with institutions of authority and mobilized in the reactionary governance of social order. This article challenges the discipline's familiar origin myth—centred on benign laboratory demonstrations of social influence—by re-situating crowd psychology as one of social psychology's earliest and most politically consequential points of emergence. From nineteenth-century crowd theory, through mid-twentieth-century de-individuation research, to contemporary public-order doctrine, assumptions about the inherent irrationality and danger of collective action have been repeatedly reformulated in scientific form, their persistence reflecting institutional and ideological fit rather than explanatory adequacy. Against this background, the article repositions the Social Identity Approach and the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) not merely as theoretical corrections, but as a reorientation of how psychological knowledge is produced, authorized and used. Drawing on ethnographic participatory action research and sustained engagement with policing institutions in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, it conceptualizes collective behaviour as interactional and normatively organized, with policing practices constitutive of crowd dynamics rather than external to them. The article argues that co-production is not a methodological innovation but a historically persistent condition of social psychology and that the ESIM represents a distinctive attempt to govern this condition reflexively by redirecting psychological knowledge towards legitimacy, restraint and the facilitation of democratic rights. The broader implication is that social psychology cannot plausibly claim political neutrality: its concepts travel into institutions and practices, shaping how collective action is anticipated, governed and policed.