Emotional Tsunamis

Emotional Tsunamis

“In crowds, emotions are communicated and amplified.”
—Gustave Le Bon

Emotional Tsunamis

Mood is like a current in that we flow along and go where it takes us if we do not participate in changing it. Events and behaviors of others can splash us with new emotion and alter the current we’re flowing in if we are not resilient to it. The mood we are in will change our interpretations of events, and the voices in our heads will guide us accordingly. The voices, their beliefs, and their expectations cause us to behave in subtle unconscious ways that even we don’t realize. These behaviors make our beliefs self-actualize.

This dynamic does not only occur at a personal level with small splashes of emotion, but giant waves of emotion can also occur sweeping up everyone in the vicinity who is not well-positioned to withstand it. Entire groups of people can be swept up into the same emotional current at the same time. One can easily imagine this with politics and religion where ideologies rile people up and mob mentality takes over, but we can also see some significant events in the world of sports.

As of writing, Wikipedia lists over 45 riots that spontaneously broke out purely due to sports victories. These weren’t reactions to bad referee calls or injustices, but to the emotional high or low from a win or a loss. And yes, even the winners began riots. In many cases, it is ordinary people who find themselves participating in behaviors they never imagined they’d be part of as this wave of emotion blew over everyone present.

In 1984, the Detroit Tigers’ victory over the San Diego Padres triggered riots that left one person dead, 80 injured, and included 8 reported cases of rape. Again in 1990, riots after the Detroit Pistons won the NBA Finals left eight more dead. Chicago saw similar chaos on five separate occasions following Bulls championships.

Sports riots aren’t just an American phenomenon either. In 2012, 79 people were killed in Egypt during the Port Said Stadium riot. Other sports-related riots have occurred in Mexico, England, France, Spain, Canada, China, South Africa, and even Pompeii in the year 59. Basketball, football, soccer, hockey, and even gladiator matches have all served as emotional ignition points. It’s a phenomenon studied globally by social scientists under the umbrella of crowd psychology.

While many examples of emotionally charged group waves are negative—riots, stampedes, wars, black Friday Furby sales, and mob violence—there are also positive examples: people singing together on balconies during COVID-19 lockdowns, people bonding through other shared hardships like boot camp, congregations moved by collective worship, motivational speaking events, disaster relief efforts, Taylor Swift concerts, or innovation teams united by vision and purpose. The emotional current runs both ways, but we’re more likely to hear about the sensationally negative ones.

With emotion operating so powerfully at both the personal and collective level, the importance of culture should be rather straightforward. Culture is just a fancy word for the way people think, feel, and operate around you. If you have a job, you may notice an intentional focus on culture in the workplace. This isn’t to say your company is any good at manufacturing it, but the corporations seem to have a surface-level understanding of the presumed importance.

In his book The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups¹, Daniel Coyle recounts a story at a U.S. military missile silo. The missileers there were widely perceived as disengaged, lazy, and overall low-performing. Morale was persistently low and errors were a significant concern—it was a missile silo, after all, so poor performance was perhaps riskier than many other professions.

Leadership tried cracking down on mistakes. They even incentivized reporting on each other to keep people alert and they had many surprise evaluations. It was a culture of fear that paralyzed any hope of progress or improvement. Only until they got to the root of the problem (the emotions shaping this culture) could they resolve the issue instead of making it worse.

The missileers saw themselves as being in a disrespected and dead-end job. They were replaceable, unimportant, and demeaned by the lack of trust and respect. They did not have what is known as psychological safety: they couldn’t communicate openly or honestly in fear of social or punitive retribution. All these perceptions and realities bred the very low performance they were setting out to squash. Much like the rats, they were riding on emotional currents that disrupted their ability to function, persevere, and succeed. Each new measure proved that they were expected to fail.

When the emotional issues were addressed to provide purpose, foster trust, and provide meaning, these exact same people in the exact same job were suddenly able to perform at a high level. Everything turned around. The issue was not the people, but the emotional current they were drowning in.

Coyle also discusses a 2002 study² referring to specific people as “good apples” and “bad apples”. Such people have the power to keep groups on task with high performance or disrupt groups entirely. A planted bad apple would yawn in meetings, look disinterested, and lay his head down. Before long everyone else was disengaged with others even laying their heads down as well. The good apples, on the other hand, learned a technique I like to call stream bending.

In order to stream bend, one must be aware of the negative streams and the tools with which to make them powerless. If someone retorts with a negative can’t-do attitude, a successful stream bender can dodge the sting and instead respond in just the right way to disarm the behavior. They can prevent others from being damaged by it and even lighten the mood of the culprit.

Most of the time, this stream bending is comprised of merely providing approval to the sour individual. If Frank chimes in with a can’t-do attitude and a disruptive rhetorical question, the successful stream bender might say, “That is actually an excellent question, Frank, and thank you for bringing it up. What Frank is getting at is X, and I think together we can resolve this if we put our minds to it.” Now, if this is done too cheesy or fake, it may make matters worse, but there is indeed a balance that will suck the poison right out of these bad apple barbs and spit it on the floor. Most bad attitudes come from a barrage of disappointments in life mostly centered around a person feeling ignored. Make them truly feel heard, and they will love you.

A single person’s emotional disposition can affect an entire organization either for good or for bad. Culture Code is well worth the read to drive this point home further. Emotions powerfully affect the realities around us and Coyle demonstrates this well within his book. But to know how bad things can truly get with culture, we must turn to the famous Stanford Prison Experiment.

In The Lucifer Effect³, Philip Zimbardo explains how what we call evil rarely begins with actual evil intent, but grows from environments that foster it. The book opens with the all-too-famous, or perhaps now infamous, Stanford Prison Experiment⁴ that Zimbardo himself orchestrated with critical regret in hindsight.

In this experiment, Zimbardo converted a basement at Stanford into a mock prison. Twenty-four college students psychologically screened for normality, stability, and non-aggression or dominance were randomly assigned to be either “guards” or “prisoners.” Prisoners were arrested at their homes, booked, stripped, deloused, given smocks and ID numbers, and housed in cells. Guards were given uniforms, mirrored sunglasses, batons, and broad authority to maintain order. During orientation, they were encouraged to establish dominance and create feelings of fear, arbitrariness, and powerlessness without using physical violence. Zimbardo himself assumed the role of prison superintendent. The experiment was planned to run two weeks.

Zimbardo’s goal? He wanted to test whether ordinary, psychologically healthy people would behave differently when placed in a structured environment that granted unequal power and authority and whether that environment alone could produce cruelty, submission, or a general moral drift. To put it more simply, he was testing if abuse was caused by bad people or if bad systems created people who abuse. The experiment provided insight all too well, and if the beginning of this book has taught us anything at this point, we can understand why.

In a short 36 hours of the planned 2 weeks, prisoners were already showing acute reactions of stress. They were crying, enraged, confused, and showing psychosomatic health symptoms. One was released on account of an emotional breakdown. Guards immediately began creating arbitrary rules, sleep depriving the prisoners as punishment for breaking those rules, forcing them to do humiliating tasks like cleaning toilets with their bare hands, stripping prisoners naked, placing bags over their heads, isolating them in solitary confinement, and encouraging them to turn on each other.

In all of this, you might ask where Zimbardo was as the prison superintendent and orchestrator of this experiment. Where were the safeguards? Shockingly enough, the current of malice was strong enough to sway even him. He began degrading the students as weak if they wanted to quit the experiment while not only failing to stop the escalating punishments but even approving them through the lens of “prison order.” He completely lost sight of the intended purpose and became an artifact of the test itself. For a deeper account of the incident, he recounts it in grueling detail in his book.

It is easy enough to expect this outcome when we understand the feedback loops of emotions and the innate desire to relish being in the safer group by picking on the perceived disadvantaged group. We are all susceptible to emotional waves and we become what the currents we ride on force us into. The only way to protect ourselves is to recognize the currents, remain wary of the emotional influences that impact us, and curate the very currents and waves around us. These emotional feedback loops and currents are extraordinarily impactful to our lives.

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