Since last week, when I wrote about how I and other social psychologists were studying the crowds of people queueing to watch the ceremonials following the death of Queen Elizabeth, there has been something strange happening. The Queue itself, and what it tells us about the state of our nation, has become more important than the ceremonies. We stopped watching the competition and began watching ourselves.
This was the beginning of a lot of changes. The size and behavior of the crowds were not simply indicative of the state of the nation. Through these crowds, we saw a change in our desire to participate in the events, a change in our relationship with those in the crowd, and a change in our relationship with the state. It seems that a week is not only in politics.
There were two things that grabbed the public imagination. The second was the size of the crowd. The funeral crowd was thought to be the largest. The answer is that it probably wasn't. Up to 10 million people watched the funeral of the Iranian leader. After the death of the chief minister of Madras, 16 million people were present. The queue to pay respects to Vysotsky stretched from the Taganka theatre in Moscow to the cemetery where he was buried. There are more important things to think about. Asking if this is the biggest queue ever invokes a sense of exceptionalism.
The second factor is about being exceptional. The queue has been described asquintessentially and uniquely British: polite, restrained and orderly. This isn't accurate like most "timeless" national phenomena. The idea of the British as a nation of queuers has been around for a long time. There was a concerted propaganda drive to make orderly queueing into a national duty and a symbol of being British because of the government's fear of social disorder. The controlled crowds were not indicative of Britishness. Britishness was used to control the crowd.
When people are waiting to witness a funeral or other ceremony they are often described as going back to time immemorial but were actually invented in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The act of queueing seemed to be more significant because of the focus on the event. People wanted to be a part of it. As we talked to people, this became more important as a reason to attend. Many people who had been sitting at home without thinking of joining in began to fear missing out on immortality. The crowd grew bigger and more significant as it became more significant and attracted more people. The snowball was rolling and growing fast.
Another transformation took place when drawn to the crowd. A sense of shared identity was created by the shared experience and common goals of those waiting. The emergence of community was made possible by shared identity. People become friends. People began to talk to each other. People continued to support each other through the long march. The joy of human connection made people stay in the crowd.
One more transformation occurred when people came into the presence of the coffin and crown as the crowd moved closer to the hall. The relationship of queuers to each other became the relationship of royalty. Each person in the hall stood alone in the presence of the Queen's coffin and her attendants. The people who were there told us how their senses changed. A new concept has been created. Experiences like this reflect a previous identification with the monarchy. Collective experiences increase identification.
The Queen's death has been the focus of most of the discussion of the response. The important thing is how these events change people. As we went in, we didn't come out of the last 10 days. The whole point is that. They are for engineers. We get important insights into how that process works.
Stephen Reicher is a professor of psychology and an authority on crowd psychology.
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