The desocialisation effect that occurs when one becomes a faceless body within a crowd is a supremely powerful psychological effect. One only needs to look back to the London riots to see the devastating effects that anonymous mass action can have. Its a situation that everyone has been in and I personally think back to my days at boarding school as the best example from my life.
As anyone who has ever boarded knows, food is scarce. And I mean REALLY scarce. At morning tea we would be given a selection of sandwiches, laid out very nicely by the kitchen staff. Enough for each boy to have a very reasonable four sandwiches each.
It started innocently enough. One boy obviously having missed breakfast took five sandwiches. Very soon this was standard practice for the seniors who were allowed to push to the front of the queue. And of course their would be a very sorry looking second year who wouldn't get.
Greed is a funny thing however and realizing that they could get away with five it very soon escalated to boys taking ten. Then twenty. Eventually it turned into a two hundred meter dash between the fastest senior boys of each dorm who would take the whole tray of roughly three hundred sandwiches and distribute them between the five or six in their wing.
Of course such a situation can't last and after one particularly rough fight over the tray that saw all the sandwiches land in the flower bed the kitchen decided to revoke food privileges. It's amazing what withholding food can do to change attitudes quickly.
Presumably parents the world over haven't picked up on this trend yet because just yesterday I had the unpleasantness of witnessing a child's temper tantrum in Woolworths. Surely little Johnny wouldn't be quite as loud and annoying if his mum had the 'no food for a week' card to play. Instead we had to listen to his screams for twenty minutes before she finally caved and bought him the chocolate coated popcorn that costs more per gram than rhino horn.
In other completely related news, I watched Derren Browns new show on BBC Knowledge last night. Called 'The Experiment', he tested the effects of mob mentality on a room full of unsuspecting people. I was genuinely amazed as I watched these people determining the direction of one mans life. He lost his job, got arrested, kidnapped and had his TV destroyed. All conscience decisions made by people under the shroud of anonymity.
After a particularly harrowing image that saw the man apparently get hit by a car, Derren turned the 'game' on its head by revealing his true motives. Removing the anonymity they once felt, many in the audience broke down crying as they realized what pain they had inflicted unashamedly and without motive.
Things I learnt from these experiences is that no matter what the overwhelming majority says, stay with your gut feeling. And that I have probably stumbled upon the psychological solution to disciplining kids - just don't tell child line.
