Steve Reicher

Stephen D Reicher (Steve Reicher) is Professor of Social Psychology and former Head of the School of Psychology at the University of St Andrews.

Reicher completed his undergraduate degree and PhD at the University of Bristol. At Bristol, Reicher worked closely with Henri Tajfel and John Turner (authors of social identity theory). He held positions at the University of Dundee and University of Exeter before moving to St Andrews in 1998. He is a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology and Chief Editor (with Margaret Wetherell) of the British Journal of Social Psychology. Reicher is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and consultant editor for a number of journals including Scientific American Mind. His research is in the area of social psychology, focusing on group processes such as crowd behaviour, tyranny and leadership. He is broadly interested in the issues of group behaviour and the individual-social relationship. His research interests can be grouped into three areas. The first is an attempt to develop a model of crowd action that accounts for both social determination and social change. The second concerns the construction of social categories through language and action. The third concerns political rhetoric and mass mobilisation – especially around the issue of national identity.

Reicher's work on crowd psychology has been path-breaking. He challenged the dominant notion of crowd as site of irrationality and deindividuation. His social identity model (SIM, 1982, 1984, 1987) of crowd behaviour suggests that people are able to act as one in crowd events not because of 'contagion' or social facilitation but because they share a common social identity. This common identity specifies what counts as normative conduct. Unlike the 'classic' theories, which tended to presume that collectivity was associated with uncontrolled violence (due to a regression to instinctive drives or a pre-existing 'racial unconscious'), the social identity model explicitly acknowledges variety by suggesting that different identities have different norms – some peaceful, some conflictual – and that, even where crowds are conflictual, the targets will be only those specified by the social identity of the crowd.

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