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Information Cascades and Rioting

While the theory of Information Cascades originated in the fields of economic and information sciences, it is rapidly being applied to help explain a huge number of everyday events. In the area of Political Science, the idea of information cascades has been touted as a means to help explain many massive political upheavals, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Arab Spring Protests. Although information cascades themselves are not sufficient as a means to entirely explain either crisis, they allow us to get a better handle on such massive events were entirely unforeseen just days before.

One particularly interesting recent application of information cascades is in helping to explain how riots start and eventually end. In their 2011 article, Chris Ellis and John Fender use information cascades as a means to explain both revolutions, particularly the Arab Spring, and rioting, with a focus on the London riots earlier that year. The authors pair the equilibrium theory of crime with the information cascade to explain how the 2011 London riots grew in size and area rapidly, and then were eventually stopped. The authors propose that after a legitimate grievance led a small number of people to protest, all it took was a very small number of those people to commit a crime. By viewing social media and the news, various other people became aware that the people who were committing these isolated criminal acts were not being caught. Some of these people witnessing this, particularly those who have no conscience about committing crime, but usually don’t, due to the risk of being caught being higher than the potential benefit, saw that others were getting the benefit of crime at essentially no cost.  Therefore these people, disregarding what they saw in their own communities and their own personal thoughts, decided to riot and commit crime because they saw multiple others get away with it. Ultimately, this led to a continued information cascade where more and more people joined the riots after having seen the outcome of other’s choices, but not their reasoning.  Ultimately though, this process was reversed when enough police resources were mobilized to arrest enough people to swing the information cascade back the other way. Regardless of what one sees in their own local riot, seeing others being arrested elsewhere starts the information cascade back down to a normal crime level.

Although this article was written in 2011, it is very applicable today due to the events in Ferguson, Missouri. After an initial protest over a genuine grievance, a very small number of people initiated criminal acts against a business. With heavy news coverage on Ferguson, people all over the country were able to watch as a handful of people looted a store as police stood by just a short distance away. This image, combined with social media and regular social connections may have helped to create an information cascade, where individuals from within the community and surrounding areas who saw these images and heard about them from friends or social media, would have initiated further criminal acts because they believed that police would simply stand by and hence they would have a negligible chance of suffering consequences for their actions. Clearly this information cascade escalated rapidly, and led to the deterioration of the situation in Ferguson.

What is most interesting to think about in this situation however, is how this process would work in reverse.  In the 2011 London riots, increased police force helped to end the riots, but Fergusson presents a very different case, since the riots there were initiated by perceived police violence. Therefore it would pit an information cascade against crime caused by increased police activity, against the emotional and other factors contributing to increased crime which would be directly caused by these actions. Ultimately, violence in Ferguson ceased, although it would be very interesting to see a more in depth study to see the reason why the violence ended, although it would appear that a strong police presence created an information cascade against criminal action, as people put aside their emotional response and decided that committing the crime simply wasn’t worth the now very high chance of arrest.

Knowing this connection between information cascades and rioting, it will be very intriguing to watch how events unfold in Missouri over the coming weeks.

Source: http://www.voxeu.org/article/riots-and-revolutions-digital-age

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