Boy Band Concert Experiments

Introduction At boy band concerts, the general admission standing floor is an open space in front of the stage; concert attendees buy tickets at a single price and try to get as close to the stage as possible by lining up in front of the concert venue as early as two days before the doors open. During the concert, the general admission crowd, constituted by at least a hundred members at even the smallest of venues, is often a fertile spot for pushing, hair pulling, hitting or other types of physical violence. The vast majority of the concert attendees have the same intention: 1) to get a clear view of the stage and 2) to be as close to the front as possible. In the midst of a boy band concert, the general admission floor often sees widespread
pushing at the very least as an emergent property, which can then erupt into more intense types of violence. The general admission standing floor constitutes a complex system rather than a complicated system because it experiences unpredictable waves of collective action, arising and developing from micro-level interactions between different members of the crowd, without central command.

Explanatory Challenge After the boy band has first taken the stage, the general admission crowd experiences waves of pushing towards the front. One can either go with the forward force, pushing into the people in front of them, or retaliate against the people pushing them, which can result in verbal or physical altercations. There are numerous factors that can lead to the intensity of the retaliation, which we seek to explore here. The explanatory challenge will be to explain why some crowds at boy band concerts experience more violence than others, both verbal or physical.

Components and Emergent Properties
The concert attendees, who constitute the components, are completely dominated by the rules described in the introduction. There are no other hierarchies that govern their behavior. A short attendee in the back of the crowd might not be able to see over other people’s heads. In effort to get a better view, this person may try to push past the two people directly in front of them in order to get a better view. The people in front, after receiving the push, will most likely push against the two or three people in front of them just by not resisting the person pushing them. In this way, waves of pushing that start and begin at unpredictable times throughout the concert. The pushing may intensify into physical conflict or reach a more calm baseline depending on individual members of the crowd.
An important characteristic of this interaction is the anonymity of the initial instigator.
It is never clear who exactly begins pushing. It is also never clear if the concert attendees behind a member of the crowd are actively pushing them, or if the seeming “pushers” themselves are being pushed by people further behind them. The impossibility of singling out a single instigator and telling them to stop, leads to a sort of binary response by the person being pushed. 1) They can go with the forward motion and push the people in front of them. If this option is chosen, then the crowd will become more densely packed, and people are more likely to invade each other’s personal space and have uncomfortable interactions (using each other’s shoulders as armrests to take videos, stepping on each other’s toes, pressing up against each other) that could lead to irritation. This irritation could escalate into physical violence. Alternatively, as a direct result of pushing 2) the person being pushed could retaliate verbally and then physically against whoever appears to be pushing them. As a result of back-to-front pushing throughout the general admission floor, the system as a whole experiences an intense at best and violent at worst squeeze towards the front of the stage. In a more peaceful general admission floor at a boy band concert, there might just be some intense pushing. However, on more violent days, the increasing density of the crowd, increased unwanted physical interactions between members and the irritation of individual members could cause escalation into physical violence that dampens the excitement and happiness of the crowd and the concert as a
whole.
One may try to predict the tendency of a fan to push or cause violent conflict by their passion for the boy band. Following this train of thought, the concert attendees who line up earliest for the general admission crowd in order to get close to the stage are more likely to be more passionate for the crowd. However, there might be other people who lined up later, and therefore are further back on the general admission floor, because circumstances did not allow them to line up early. Thus, by assuming that the distribution of die-hard concert attendees to curious spectators is even throughout the crowd, we can remove passion a factor to pushing and assume that people generally have the same desire to be in the front.

Conclusion At the general admission floor of a boy band concert, where concert attendees want to be as close to the stage as possible and have the best view possible, anonymous instigators can cause waves of pushing to ripple through the whole crowd, in some cases causing physical altercations. The selfishness of individual members and anonymity of the instigators enables people to physically or verbally lash back to whoever is closer to them. Some crowds may experience more physical violence than others because of the aggressive way individual members react to the forceful pushing and the increasing density of the crowd.