人群

Crowds

1938年10月30日，在纽约地区，成千上万的美国人因为听了广播里描绘的一场来自火星的入侵而吓得魂飞魄散。尽管这段描述只是把H．G．威尔斯的异想天开的小说（《星际大战》戏剧化了，但它的描述竟是如此的逼真——其中包括一些杜撰的天文学家、政府官员以及一些所谓的“目击者”的报导——以至于许多听众纷纷逃离家园。1955年1月15日，正午刚过，一片极厚的黑色云带突然笼罩了整座伦敦城。这片云带是由于烟雾在极厚的云层下大量积聚而形成的。它只持续了10分钟，而就在这短短的10分钟内，女人们在大街上尖叫,男人们跪在人行道上不停祈祷，还有人歇斯底里地大喊大叫，说自己的眼睛瞎了。

On October 30, 1938, thousands of Americans in the New York area were terror-stricken by a radio broadcast describing an invasion from Mars. The presentation was merely a dramatization of H.G. Wells＇ fantastic novel The War of the Worlds , but it was presented with such stark realism -including reports from fictitious astronomers, governmental officials, and ＂eye- witnesses＂ --that many listeners fled their homes and their communities. In London on January 15, 1955, a thick belt of darkness, caused by an accumulation of smoke under an extremely thick layer of cloud, suddenly wrapped itself around the city in the early afternoon. It lasted only ten minutes; but during this time, women screamed in the streets, others fell to their knees on the sidewalks and prayed. Some cried out hysterically that they had gone blind. A man at Croydon groped through in the inky blackness shouting, ＂The end of the world has come＂. These two episodes are at once identified as cases of panic, an extreme type of crowd behaviour, which in turnZis a variety of collective behaviour. In the interests of coherence of treatment and because of limitation of space, this chapter will treat only two related aspects of collective behaviour： crowd and publics.