Study title

This data archive contains 224 transcripts of participant testimonies of a sample of people involved in the disturbances referred to as the August 2011 English riots. The Beyond Contagion project redacted the transcripts to protect the identity of participants, formatted and organised them by location of event and gender.The names above relate to the specific data archive and not the ESRC funded project. This ESRC funded project was led by Professors John Drury, Clifford Stott and Stephen Reicher. It was developed to address the question of how and why does aggression and violent behaviour spread? When, as in 2011, riots began in London, why did they then occur in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool? One of the most common ways of addressing such issues is through the notion of 'contagion'. The core idea is that, particularly in crowds, mere exposure to the behaviour of others leads observers to behave in the same way. Despite this widespread acceptance, the 'contagion' account has major problems in explaining the spread of behaviours. For example, in 2011, disturbances spread from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool but they did not spread to Sheffield, Leeds or Glasgow. 'Contagion' explanations cannot explain such patterns and limits because they assume that transmission is automatic. The 'contagion metaphor' does not take account of the social relations between the transmitter and receiver. This project proposes a new theoretical account of behavioural transmission based on the social identity approach in social psychology. This suggests that influence processes are limited by group boundaries and group content: we are more influenced by ingroup members than by outgroup members, and we are more influenced by that which is consonant with rather than contradictory to group norms. In order to advance both theoretical understanding and practical interventions, our research develops a social identity analysis of transmission processes at multiple...