Cattle Call

Black Friday lived up to its name last week as a Valley Stream, NY Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by a mob of shoppers determined to capitalize on the retail chain’s post-Thanksgiving discounts. In a textbook display of the herd mentality, Jdimytai Damour was “bum-rushed by 200 people” who stormed the front doors—tearing them off their hinges—before knocking a half-dozen people to the ground and sprinting across the store. (http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/11/28/2008-11-28_worker_dies_at_long_island_walmart_after.html ) Among those injured was a pregnant woman who reportedly miscarried after the stampede. Sadly, the tragedy is another reminder of how under the right circumstances normal people can behave more like animals than human beings.

One of the most famous incidents of people behaving like a herd of bulls took place in Dec 1979 in Cincinnati, OH at a concert for The Who. Because the concert was staged for general admission seating—meaning first come, first served—thousands of people waited outside the arena, pressed against the locked front doors, eager to grab the best seats. Upon hearing a sound check, fans mistakenly believed the concert had started and surged against the doors killing 11 and injuring many others. (http://www.distant.ca/UselessFacts/fact.asp?ID=308).

Are these herd behaviors aberrations? Unfortunately, based on a number of studies, the answer is no. Numerous experiments have proven that under the right (or wrong) conditions, people can lose the ability to think clearly and rationally. Malcolm Gladwell offers several examples in his excellent best-seller The Tipping Point. Here is one of them:

Stanford University conducted a study in the early 1970s to determine why prisons are terrible places. The scientists erected a prison in the basement of the psychology building and solicited volunteers to participate in the two-week experiment. The 75 people who joined were randomly split into guards and prisoners. After only one night the guards began abusing the prisoners: for ex., waking them at 2am to do pushups and to line-up against the wall. Each day the abuse worsened. At one point on the third day “guards were making the prisoners say to one another they loved each other, and [were] making them march down the hallway, in handcuffs, with paper bags over their heads.” (The Tipping Point, p 154) Several men had to be released after only a few days because of the emotional trauma, and the experiment itself had to be ended after only six days. Along with proving the danger of giving people too much power, the test case also showed how people can get swept along with a crowd under certain circumstance. One guard confessed afterward, “It was completely opposite from the way I conduct myself now . . . I think I was positively creative in terms of my mental cruelty.” (p 154) And it was not only the guards who were caught up in the experiment. One prisoner stated, “I began to feel that I was losing my identity, that the person I call----, the person who volunteered to get me into this prison (because it was a prison to me, it still is a prison to me, I don’t regard it as an experiment or a simulation . . .) was distant from me, was remote, until finally I wasn’t that person.” (p 154)

Should this knowledge about Man’s vulnerability to the herd mentality affect our views about the Black Friday tragedy? Absolutely not. The people who trampled Mr. Damour should be held accountable for their actions. Although it may be easy to get caught up in the frenzy, people still have the Free Will to say no. If this were not the case then every customer that day would have participated in the stampede, which clearly was not the case.

Wal-Mart should also be held accountable for doing such a poor job of organizing, as they phrased it, their “door-busters” sale. As Jordan Hecht, the lawyer for Mr. Damour’s sisters, pointed out, “"Hundreds of stores around the country have these kinds of sales, but a tragedy only happens if you don't prepare." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122818206309671069.html)

One word of advice to shoppers: the next time a store offers a crazy sale on the Wii game console or on the latest Xbox 360 game, wait till after Christmas to buy it. Your child’s emotional well-being will not suffer if he/she has to wait a week or two . . . and you may just save your own physical well-being in the process.

Donald Tremblay