UK riots: Why respectable people turned to looting

A millionaire's daughter, a school teaching assistant and a lifeguard are hardly the sort of people you'd have expected to get caught up in the wave of violent looting that hit the UK earlier this week. So what drives privileged or seemingly virtuous people to do bad things?

As those responsible for the disturbances begin to appear in court, it is becoming clear that the looters were not all out-of-control teenagers with nothing to lose. They came from a variety of backgrounds, and in some cases have expressed horror and regret at what they did.

"It's a classic demonstration of the power of the situation," says Ayelet Fishbach, a behavioural scientist at the University of Chicago, Illinois. "People in a group follow the group's norms."

The most famous example of this was the so-called Stanford prison experiment in 1971, in which students selected for their healthy psychological state were recruited to play the roles of prison guards and prisoners. The experiment was stopped after just six days because many of the "inmates" had been pushed to the point of emotional breakdown by the "guards".

There are more recent examples, too. Studies of terrorists have found that often they are neither extremely poor, nor do they suffer from personality disorders.

Not mindless

The fact that many of those caught up in the UK rioting were middle-class "is only really a surprise if you buy into the view that rioting is the preserve of mindless members of a subhuman underclass who are suffering from a range of delusions and pathologies", says Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter, UK.

"These are normal people that ended up in abnormal groups," says Fishbach. And once part of a group, a process called deindividuation means that people often give up their personal identity and values. "With the loss of personal identity and the feeling that they are not identifiable, they lose their social responsibility and engage in antisocial behaviours," says Fishbach.

However, Clarke McCauley of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania believes another factor may also have been at play: "If you watch others looting and getting richer, you are seeing them get ahead of you," he says. "It is not just the free reward value of looting that moves people, it is fear of falling behind."

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