Ob: Vancouver Riot Project

People’s Side

Individual Level

a) Affective Events Theory

-Employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work and their emotional reaction influences their behavior.

-Work Environment:

-155,000 people all in the downtown core at the same time watching the game

-Many were openly drinking on the Skytrain and while watching the game. Many were drunk early in the day prior to bag check

-Work Events:

-Canucks losing 4-0 to the Bruins in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals

-Personal Dispositions:

-Personality and Mood (Alcohol greatly amplified moods and altered personality)

-Limbic System: The limbic system consists of areas of the brain called the hippocampus and septal area. The limbic system controls emotions and memory. As alcohol affects this system, the person is subject to exaggerated states of emotion (anger, aggressiveness, and withdrawal) and memory loss)

-Inhibits thought processes - The person does not use good judgment or think clearly.

Alcohol can lead to depression, extreme mood swings, and violent aggression, and it changes the way you think about the world and people around you in a negative way.

-Emotional Reactions:

-Negative (Alcohol exponentially amplified emotion and resulting behavior short in duration and high in variability)

Emotion contagion: This is known as the emotion that gets triggered in a crowd and spreads like wildfire.  It can be positive or negative. Emotion Contagion created a vicious circle within the crowd of 155,000 people, especially since they were stuck in the core due to transportation delays and stoppages.

-Behavior:

-Riot

-There is a shared understanding of the situation and the "us vs. them" mentality takes precedence. With this, people in riots often have what is known as the false consensus effect (We tend to overestimate how the degree to which our own behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and so on are shared by other people.)

  People attribute their own beliefs and motives to...