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The psychology of riots – and why it’s never just mindless violence

Matthew RadburnPostdoctoral Research Fellow, Keele University Clifford StottProfessor of Social Psychology, Keele University It seemingly can happen anywhere – and at any time. From London to Hong Kong, apparently peaceful cities can sometimes erupt suddenly into widespread, and often sustained, unrest. But what role does psychology play in this? And can it explain how, why and when crowds turn to violence? The recent film Joker tells the bleak story of how a mentally ill loner, Arthur Fleck, becomes the infamous comic book villain – and inspires a riotous popular movement. In the film, the stage seems well set for a riot. Gotham City is depicted as “… a powder keg of lawlessness, inequality, corruption, cuts and all-round despair”. But is the crowd protesting this – or acting as a mindless mob? As commentator Aditya Vats has pointed out, the film appears to reflect the views of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who argued that society has a drive towards chaos and destruction. In the film, Fleck is portrayed as the individual who unleashes these apparently innate tendencies when he brutally kills first three wealthy young bankers – and then a TV talk show host live on air. Subsequently, thousands of rioters in clown masks are shown rioting, looting and killing, seemingly inspired by his actions. This is a simple, and popular, representation of real-world crowd violence. But does it accurately reflect the true psychology underpinning “riotous” behaviour? There are three “classical” theoretical explanations of the crowd that endure in the popular imagination. The first, “mad mob theory”, suggests that individuals lose their sense of self, reason and rationality in a crowd and so do things they otherwise might not as an individual. The second is that collective violence is the product of a convergence of “bad” – or criminal – individuals enacting their violent personal predispositions together in the same space. The third […]

What is ‘The Great Resignation’?

The Great Resignation is an idea proposed by Professor Anthony Klotz of Texas A&M University that predicts a large number of people leaving their jobs after the COVID pandemic ends and life returns to “normal.” Managers are now navigating the ripple effects from the pandemic, as employees re-evaluate their careers and leave their jobs in record numbers. Companies have a record number of open positions in the US, and to explore what has been driving this recent shift, a recent in depth analysis by Ian Cook and his team of more than 9 million employee records at 4,000 global companies revealed two trends: Resignation rates are highest among mid-career employees Resignation rates are highest in the technology and healthcare industries At the onset of the pandemic, the job market was full of uncertainty and mass layoffs: millions of people lost their jobs, and those lucky enough to remain employed remained put in their roles for survival. However, as we now turn towards recovery, workers in privileged positions who don’t live paycheck to paycheck are now finally moving on. Most in non-developed economies with the absence of social security and unemployment benefits cannot afford this luxury but may still be undergoing duress and pent-up frustration from the disruption caused by the pandemic. These trends highlight the importance to understanding why people are leaving and what can be done to prevent The Great Resignation. It also calls for a data-driven approach to determine not just how many people are quitting, but who exactly has the highest turnover risk. Given the buzz generated around the term “The Great Resignation”, we turned to Professor Dr. Isabell Welpe at the Technical University of Munich. Dr. Welpe conducts research in the area of leadership, innovation, and organisation from a behavioural science perspective, with a focus on the selection of managers, managing teams, […]

Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

by Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek magazine Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be? It all has to do with who our news media is written by―and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century―from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers. With the rise of the Internet and the implosion of local news, America’s elite news media became nationalised and its journalists affluent and ideological. And where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists’ worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades. The truth is, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. Bad News explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.

How to stop supply chain issues disrupting the economic recovery

Covid-19 revealed that modern supply chains are a house of cards, collapsing the moment they come under any kind of sustained pressure. Many businesses that were caught flat-footed by global lockdowns have found the speed of the recovery just as treacherous to navigate. Clogged ports and widespread shortages have led to record order backlogs across major supply chain hubs. The crunch on container capacity could last until Q4 2022, according to maritime research firm Drewry. Shortages of key components, including semiconductors, could take even longer to resolve. Is the answer to carry on pushing orders through in the hope that these problems resolve themselves? Two years into the pandemic, there are strong signs global businesses are starting to realise that supply chains actually need root-and-branch reform. Bursting at the seams Recent data from Tradeshift suggests buyers are beginning to question the wisdom of putting fresh orders into a system that is coming apart at the seams. Global order volumes fell by 24 points in Q3 2021 (see figure 1), the biggest quarterly drop since the first lockdowns in early 2020 and 15 points below the pre-pandemic forecast range. Rising invoice volumes provide an indication of how supply chains are reacting to demand signals. Invoice numbers moved five points closer to the expected range in Q3 2021, but the upward trajectory is flatter than anticipated given the significant spike in order volumes during the previous quarter. The data suggests it may be some time before order volumes start to align with invoice flows. The longer this gap persists, the more likely it is that the downward trajectory in Q3 signals the beginning of a more prolonged slowdown. The International Monetary Fund recently cut its forecast for US growth by 1 percentage point to 6%, citing supply chain disruption and weakening consumption. Tradeshift’s data indicates that activity across US supply […]

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Nobel peace prize:Dmitry Muratov

In 1993, Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev used part of his Nobel peace prize money to help set up the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, buying the publication its first computers. Nearly 30 years later, the paper has another Nobel peace prize in its history. Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, was jointly awarded the prize with Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”. The prize is a surprising and welcome show of support to Russia’s independent press, which has been under constant pressure during the 21 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. Thanks to Gorbachev’s perestroika political reforms and liberation of the press during the 1980s, investigative journalists became national heroes in the late Soviet Union. They revealed the regime’s crimes of the past, tracing them in newly-opened archives, and uncovered corruption among bureaucrats who abused their power to enrich themselves. It was in this context that Muratov’s career skyrocketed. In 1987, he left his hometown to join Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in Moscow. This newspaper of the young Communists took a critical stance towards the Soviet regime in its final years, and was considered a leading voice of perestroika. Komsomolskaya Pravda was among the newspapers that stood against the 1991 military coup, led by a conservative bloc of the Communist government, to overthrow Gorbachev. The August coup marked the end of the Soviet Union, which collapsed in December that year, and led to a new era for the press. In 1992, Muratov left Komsomolskaya Pravda over a dispute about the paper’s future. Muratov was among those who defended the newspaper as an investigative media outlet, while his competitor Valery Sungorkin sought to turn it into a tabloid to make money. The tabloid view succeeded. Muratov and a team of colleagues began publishing New […]

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

-A new book by Nicholas Carr “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallised one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud […]

Beautiful World, Where Are You

-by Sally Rooney Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Image: Huawei's Executive Board Director Meng Wanzhou attends the VTB Capital Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow

Why China’s hostage diplomacy failed

On the face of it, the fact that Canada’s “two Michaels” — Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — boarded a Canadian government aircraft in Beijing at about the same time that Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was being released from her extradition hearing bail requirements in Vancouver might indicate to some that China’s “hostage diplomacy” was successful. There was a clear link between Meng’s plea bargain arrangement with the United States Department of Justice, her subsequent release in Vancouver and the release of the two Michaels after more than 1,000 days in captivity. Despite consistent Chinese denials over many months that their arrest was in retaliation for the detention of Meng under the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty, the fact that the two cases were resolved simultaneously (even before Kovrig had been sentenced by the Chinese court) stripped away any pretence that there was no connection. In the past, in cases involving detention in China of foreign nationals when there have been unrelated disputes with their country of origin, the release of the “hostages” has not come for several weeks or months after the resolution of the original dispute. That’s allowed China to maintain the fiction that it doesn’t detain people for retaliatory purposes and to argue that Chinese law must run its course. This time, even that fig leaf was removed. Deferred prosecution agreement In order to secure her release, Meng was given only the lightest of punishments, a deferred prosecution arrangement that required her to neither plead guilty nor pay a fine. All she was required to do was consent to a statement of facts that outlined the U.S. view of what happened when she allegedly misled global bank HSBC into believing that a Huawei subsidiary operating in Iran was not in fact controlled by Huawei. The deferred prosecution agreement will expire in 2022, and then the case […]

Media Unmade -Australia’s Most Disruptive Decade

By Tim Burrowes Media Unmade presents the definitive story of the decade in which big media in Australia was cut down to size – a decade that forever altered what had until then been perceived as the unbreachable foundations of the industry in this country. Drawing on insights from his ringside seat, independent journalist, commentator and Mumbrella founder Tim Burrowes knits together the big events and conversations with key players then and now to reveal the drama and tell the stories behind the changes that every consumer of Australian media has witnessed over the past decade. In this unprecedented account, Tim considers how the newspaper rivers of gold evaporated, TV viewers turned to Netflix, and radio listeners started streaming instead. He covers how networks went broke, the ABC came under sustained attack, and how News Corporation’s phone hacking drama in the UK delivered Rupert Murdoch to the most humble day of his life. Of course there is no drama without people and as much as Media Unmade is the tale of the fluctuating fortunes of some of the country’s best-known companies, it also presents the compelling stories of the powerful personalities who have shaped them – from the Murdochs, to Antony Catalano and Greg Hywood, to Kim Williams and James Packer, Gina Rinehart, Alan Jones, Michelle Guthrie, Justin Milne and Kerry Stokes. Against the existential threat embodied by Google and Facebook, Australia’s media companies remade their broken business models and plotted takeovers in a battle for survival. And just when the worst seemed to be over, COVID-19 delivered the biggest advertising recession of all time, pushing every media company to the brink. Tim Burrowes is the award-winning founder of Mumbrella. Working on newspapers, magazines and online, he has been a journalist for more than 30 years and has worked in the UK, Middle East and […]

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