Person
Stephen Reicher
Psychologist who co-conducted the BBC Prison Study and joined calls for debate about the Stanford study.
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Background on Stephen Reicher
Background
Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.
Stephen David Reicher FBA FRSE is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Social Psychology at the University of St Andrews.
His research is in the area of social psychology, focusing on social identity, collective behaviour, intergroup conflict, leadership and mobilisation. He is broadly interested in the issues of group behaviour and the individual-social relationship.
Education
After attending the Perse School, Cambridge, Reicher completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Bristol, and his PhD also at the University of Bristol in 1984 with a thesis on collective behaviour. At Bristol, Reicher worked closely with Henri Tajfel and John Turner on social identity theory and social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE).
Career and research
Reicher held positions at the University of Dundee and University of Exeter before moving to St Andrews in 1997. He was formerly head of the School of Psychology at St Andrews.
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 an editor for a number of journals including Scientific American Mind. His research is in the area of social psychology, focusing on social identity, collective behaviour, intergroup conflict, leadership and mobilisation. 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. His research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). His former doctoral students include John Dixon, John Drury, Nick Hopkins, Mark Levine, Eva Loth, Fabio Sani and Clifford Stott
Stephen Reicher as well as his direct University of Sussex colleague John Drury are both participants in the Sage subcommittee advising on behavioural science during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was also a member of the advisory committee to the Scottish Government and convened the behavioural science group of Independent SAGE.
Reicher's work on crowd psychology has 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. …
From the Wikipedia article Steve Reicher (revision of ). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).