When the looting begins during civil unrest, something remarkable happens to otherwise law-abiding citizens. Students who pride themselves on integrity, professionals who counsel others on ethical behaviour—all can find themselves swept into the collective action. The explanation typically offered involves mob mentality, loss of individual responsibility, or temporary moral failure. But this misses the deeper truth: it is simply easier to loot when everyone else is looting. Not easier morally, but easier biologically. The human brain, evolved over millennia for small-group survival, encounters modern crowds with programming designed for an entirely different world.
This essay builds upon themes explored in previous work—particularly "The Evolutionary Roots of Resistance" and "Living Emergence: How Collective Intelligence Shapes Our Everyday Lives"—to examine mob behaviour not as pathology but as evolutionary adaptation. Where those essays explored how biological imperatives shape resistance to change and how collective patterns emerge from individual behaviour, this essay focuses specifically on how professional helping systems become mobs that maintain rather than resolve the problems they address.
The essay examines the whirlpool of professional groupthink: from professional helping systems to social media outrage, from political movements to workplace dynamics, the same ancient programming produces predictable patterns: collective identity formation, simplified targeting of victims, diffusion of individual responsibility, and crucially, maintenance of the status quo through collective validation rather than individual action.
For approximately 40,000 years—perhaps far longer—humans lived in small family groups. Archaeological and anthropological evidence consistently points toward social structures organised around intimate bands rarely exceeding 50 individuals, nested within slightly larger communities. This represents the environment in which human social cognition evolved: face-to-face relationships, individual recognition of all group members, direct reciprocity, and immediate accountability within known networks.
Robin Dunbar's research in the early 1990s quantified what many had long suspected about primate social limits. By studying the relationship between neocortex size and group size in primates, Dunbar extrapolated that humans could comfortably maintain approximately 150 stable relationships—what has become known as Dunbar's number. More importantly, his work revealed nested layers of social capacity: support cliques of around five people, sympathy groups of fifteen, close networks of fifty, and that outer limit of 150 for meaningful relationships where individuals know not only each person but how they relate to everyone else.
British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist (b. 1947). Professor at Oxford University whose groundbreaking research linked brain size to social group size in primates. His "Dunbar's Number" theory (approximately 150 meaningful relationships) revolutionised understanding of human social capacity. His work demonstrates that our cognitive architecture physically limits the number of stable social relationships we can maintain—a biological constraint that no amount of social media or technology has overcome.
While subsequent research has challenged the precise figure—with confidence intervals ranging from as low as 30 to as high as 520—the fundamental principle remains unchallenged: primate brains have finite capacity for tracking complex social relationships. Whether the limit sits at 50, 150, or 250, it exists. And critically, it exists not through cultural conditioning but through neurological architecture. The volume of the neocortex, the mechanisms for social grooming, the cognitive load of maintaining reciprocity—all point toward hardware limitations that no amount of cultural innovation has overcome.
Consider what this means for contemporary human existence. A football stadium holds 50,000 people. A music festival may attract 100,000. Cities contain millions. Political movements span nations. Corporate organisations employ thousands across multiple sites. University campuses bring together tens of thousands of students and staff. Modern warfare coordinates hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Online social networks claim hundreds or thousands of "connections" per individual.
Every one of these contexts forces primate brains—evolved for intimate bands—into scales that exceed processing capacity. The mechanisms that worked brilliantly for small groups simply crash when confronted with crowds. Personal responsibility, face-to-face accountability, individual recognition, direct reciprocity, reputation management within known networks—all the social technologies that governed human interaction for millennia become impossible to maintain.
The evolutionary logic of conformity is brutally simple. For tens of thousands of years, going against the group meant social death, which typically meant actual death. Humans who deviated from group consensus, who refused to follow collective action, who insisted on individual judgment over group wisdom—these individuals faced exclusion. And exclusion from the group meant loss of access to shared resources, collective defence, reproductive opportunities, and the knowledge accumulated across generations.
Natural selection thus favoured individuals whose brains generated powerful compulsions toward group conformity. The neurochemistry of belonging—the dopamine release when accepted, the oxytocin bonding through shared activity, the endorphin rewards of synchronised movement and shared emotion—all function as biological carrots drawing individuals toward the collective. Conversely, the distress of isolation, the cortisol spike of group disapproval, the anxiety of standing alone—these function as biological sticks punishing deviation.
These are not conscious choices that individuals make. They are automatic processes occurring beneath awareness. When everyone around is acting in concert, the primate brain receives overwhelming signals: safety lies in conformity, danger lies in deviation. This is why it feels easier to loot when everyone is looting. The moral calculus—"I know stealing is wrong"—must overcome biological programming screaming: "Follow the group, follow the group, follow the group."
Solomon Asch's conformity experiments in the 1950s demonstrated this compulsion with elegant simplicity. Participants, placed in groups with confederates who deliberately gave wrong answers to simple visual tasks, conformed to the incorrect group judgment approximately one-third of the time. These were not complex moral questions or ambiguous situations. They were straightforward perceptual tasks where the correct answer was obvious. Yet the pressure to conform proved strong enough to override direct sensory evidence.
Pioneering social psychologist (1907-1996). Polish-American researcher whose 1950s experiments at Swarthmore College demonstrated the overwhelming power of group pressure. Participants asked to judge line lengths gave obviously wrong answers 37% of the time when confederates unanimously chose incorrectly. The experiments revealed that intelligent, educated adults would deny their own sensory perception rather than contradict group consensus—evidence that conformity operates below conscious control as a biological imperative.
The mechanisms underlying mob behaviour—deindividuation, diffusion of responsibility, emotional contagion—are not modern psychological problems. They are features of primate cognition encountering scales beyond processing capacity. When the number of people present exceeds the brain's ability to track individuals and maintain personal accountability, the system defaults to cruder collective responses. The individual identity that depends on being known within a network of relationships dissolves. What remains is the simplest possible identity: member of this group, doing what this group does.
Critically, this happens to intelligent, educated, morally sophisticated individuals. It happens to people who would never dream of looting alone, who pride themselves on critical thinking, who counsel others on ethical behaviour. The compulsion toward conformity does not require stupidity or moral weakness. It requires only a primate brain encountering a crowd.
Research on innovation adoption and social change reveals a consistent population distribution pattern. Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovations theory identifies approximately 16 percent of any population as innovators and early adopters—individuals who naturally question convention, resist conformity, and explore alternatives before the majority accepts them. This suggests that roughly 20 percent of individuals demonstrate what might be called rule-breaking tendencies, while the remaining 80 percent tend toward rule-following, social cohesion, and conventional thinking.
American communication theorist and sociologist (1931-2004). His seminal work "Diffusion of Innovations" (1962) identified how new ideas spread through populations in predictable patterns: Innovators (2.5%), Early Adopters (13.5%), Early Majority (34%), Late Majority (34%), and Laggards (16%). This 20/80 distribution appears across all cultures—suggesting biological rather than cultural origins. The theory reveals that most humans are neurologically wired for conformity and group cohesion, with only a minority possessing the cognitive variation that enables independent thinking and resistance to mob dynamics.
This distribution appears across cultures and contexts, suggesting biological rather than purely cultural origins. It makes evolutionary sense: too many deviants would prevent group cohesion; too few would eliminate innovation and adaptation. The 20/80 split might represent an evolutionarily stable strategy where most individuals maintain group stability while a minority explores alternatives.
One might assume these 20 percenters would be immune to mob dynamics. They are not. They simply relate to mobs differently, through three primary patterns:
First, they may resist mob behaviour more effectively than the 80 percent—but this resistance requires constant cognitive effort against biological pressure. Standing alone while the group acts in concert activates all the ancient alarm systems designed to punish deviation. The 20 percenter feels the compulsion to follow; they simply have marginally better capacity to override it. This is exhausting, isolating, and biologically expensive.
Second, they may manipulate mob dynamics rather than resist them. Understanding the mechanisms that others follow blindly, the 20 percenter may position themselves to direct collective action, to channel mob energy toward their own ends, to become the voice that the conforming majority follows. This is not resistance to mob behaviour but sophisticated exploitation of it.
Third, they may form counter-mobs—breaking from mainstream collectives to join "rebel" groups that offer the same collective identity, shared purpose, and conformity pressures as any other mob. The environmental activist mob, the anti-establishment political mob, the contrarian intellectual mob—all provide the biological satisfactions of belonging while maintaining the fiction of independence.
The rule-breaker who truly stands alone, who resists all mob dynamics consistently, who maintains individual judgment regardless of group pressure—this person pays enormous biological and social costs. They remain perpetually outside, perpetually vigilant, perpetually fighting against programming designed to draw them in. Most 20 percenters find ways to satisfy the biological imperative for belonging while preserving some degree of independent thought. Complete resistance is rare, exhausting, and often counterproductive.
Perhaps the most counterintuitive aspect of mob behaviour is its fundamentally conservative function. Mobs appear radical, disruptive, transformative. They storm buildings, overturn conventions, demand change. Yet beneath the surface drama, mobs serve primarily to maintain existing structures through collective validation rather than individual action.
Consider the mechanism: when energy flows into collective identity and shared outrage, it does not flow into individual problem-solving and personal responsibility. The mob member experiences the neurochemical satisfaction of belonging, the moral clarity of shared purpose, the emotional intensity of collective action—all while changing nothing fundamental about their own life or capabilities.
Professional helping systems demonstrate this pattern clearly. Social workers, therapists, support workers, education staff, health visitors—all gather around "struggling families" in configurations that often exceed 15-20 professionals per family. This exceeds the cognitive capacity for genuine reciprocal relationships. The result is not a coordinated team but a professional mob, bound together by shared identity as "helpers" and shared focus on the "struggling family" as target.
This mob serves crucial functions for its members. It provides:
But what does it provide the family? Typically: maintenance of their dependent status. The professional mob needs the family to remain struggling because that struggle justifies the mob's existence. Genuine empowerment—the family developing capacity to function independently—would dissolve the mob's purpose. Thus the system perpetuates itself through collective validation of victim status rather than transformation of victim capacity.
The pattern repeats across contexts. Social media outrage mobs maintain "our group is righteous" identity without requiring members to examine their own behaviour. Political mobs maintain "our side versus their side" structure without addressing systemic problems. Workplace mobs maintain existing power dynamics through collective gossip and shared grievances that never translate into actual challenge or change.
The mob feels radical but functions conservatively because it channels energy into maintaining the collective rather than transforming individuals. Status quo persists not through oppression but through the biological satisfactions of belonging masquerading as meaningful action.
Mobs require external focus to maintain cohesion. Without a target—whether victim to rescue or enemy to attack—the collective identity lacks definition. This creates a peculiar dynamic: the mob needs its victim more than the victim needs the mob.
Consider the Karpman Drama Triangle, that elegant model of victim-rescuer-persecutor dynamics. In this triangle, the victim appears most powerless. Yet the victim holds the real power: without them, the entire structure collapses. The rescuer can find another victim to save. The persecutor can find another target to attack. But the victim, by transcending victimhood, destroys the whole system.
American psychiatrist and Transactional Analysis practitioner (b. 1934). Developed the Drama Triangle in 1968, revealing how people unconsciously adopt roles of Victim, Rescuer, or Persecutor in dysfunctional social interactions. His model demonstrates that these roles are interdependent—each needs the others to maintain the dynamic. Most significantly, the seemingly powerless Victim actually controls the system, as their transcendence of victimhood would collapse the entire triangle. Widely used in therapy, social work, and organisational psychology to understand persistent dysfunction.
This explains why mobs work so hard to maintain victim status even when ostensibly trying to "help." The professional mob around a struggling family provides support, resources, intervention—yet somehow the family remains struggling, generation after generation. The social media mob rushes to defend the victimised group—yet that group's victim status must be constantly reinforced through new examples of oppression. The political mob champions the downtrodden—yet the downtrodden must remain down for the mob to maintain purpose.
The case of the Morrison family illustrates how the Drama Triangle operates when all three positions become mobs, each maintaining dysfunction through what Melanie Klein identified as projective identification—the unconscious mechanism by which emotional states spread like contagion through groups.
Sarah and Michael Morrison have seven children with multiple different fathers. Both parents have limited educational attainment, restricted life experience, and what professionals delicately term "executive functioning difficulties." Michael has an ADHD diagnosis; Sarah demonstrates similar patterns of impulsivity and poor decision-making. The family lives in perpetual crisis—not dramatic abuse or neglect, but grinding, repetitive crises of poor judgment and limited capacity.
Around this family, a professional mob has formed. At the core, perhaps eight significant professionals coordinate support: social worker, family support worker, school SENCO, mental health professional, health visitor, housing officer, education welfare officer, therapeutic practitioner. Beyond this core, perhaps another dozen individuals have peripheral involvement—case managers, administrators, supervisors who attend occasional meetings, contribute to reports, add their perspective to the shared narrative.
Austrian-British psychoanalyst (1882-1960). Pioneer of object relations theory and child analysis. Klein identified "projective identification"—a primitive defence mechanism where unwanted parts of the self are split off and projected into another person, who then unconsciously identifies with and acts out these projections. In group dynamics, this creates emotional contagion: the family projects helplessness, professionals identify with being helpers, each unconsciously acting out the other's projections. This isn't conscious manipulation but unconscious interpersonal process where all parties become infected by and amplify each other's emotional states and defensive positions.
A recent incident demonstrates how all three Drama Triangle positions operate as mobs, bound together through projective identification. A family support worker took one of the Morrison children to McDonald's as part of a planned activity. The child asked for a cappuccino, but the worker bought orange juice instead, citing health concerns and potential caffeine effects on the child's behaviour when returning to school.
This trivial incident became the perfect container for the triangular mob dynamics. The Morrison parents (Victim Mob) fixated on this "injustice" for weeks, raising it repeatedly in meetings, demanding apologies, expressing outrage at this denial of their child's autonomy. They projected their sense of perpetual victimisation into this single event, and the professional mob unconsciously identified with this projection, taking hours to discuss it seriously.
The professionals (Rescuer Mob) responded with endless patience and concern, validating the family's feelings while developing new plans to "address communication issues." They projected their need to help, and the family identified with being "struggling but trying." Each professional meeting reinforced the mob's shared narrative: this is a complex family requiring support.
The system—schools, housing, health services—occupied the Persecutor position, though not actively. Their rules about caffeine, behavioural expectations, and household standards create the "injustices" that fuel the victim narrative. When professionals observed the family's fixation—"you seem stuck in a loop"—the observation produced blank stares. The concept meant nothing to parents who lack the meta-cognitive capacity for such self-reflection.
What makes this triangular mob so persistent is that all three groups gain satisfaction from maintaining the dysfunction:
Through projective identification, each mob infects the others with their emotional state. The family's chaos spreads to the professionals (meetings become confused, plans become contradictory). The professionals' anxiety about helping spreads to the family (creating more crises to justify intervention). The system's rigidity spreads to both (everyone focuses on rules and procedures rather than reality).
The professionals develop plans: attend medical appointments, establish bedtime routines, respond to school communications, maintain a clean home. The family agrees enthusiastically. Nothing changes. The cycle repeats. This isn't failure—it's success. Everyone maintains their position in the triangle.
Yet beneath this theatre lies an unspoken truth. The Morrison parents lack the executive function, knowledge base, and meta-cognitive capacity for independent functioning. They will require support indefinitely, not because the system failed them but because their capabilities cannot meet modern life's complexity. The professional mob cannot voice this reality because doing so would mean admitting:
So the mob maintains the fiction: this is a struggling family needing support who will eventually transform with enough help. The McDonald's cappuccino incident wasn't really about coffee—it was about keeping the triangle spinning, ensuring all three mobs remain locked in their satisfying, destructive dance.
What happens when someone escapes this triangular mob? The Morrison family's eldest son, quietly focusing on school rather than family chaos, building peer relationships outside the household—he transcends the victim position. He finds his tribe elsewhere. The professional mob barely notices. His success doesn't fit the narrative, requires no intervention, generates no crisis. The drama continues with the remaining family members, the triangle intact, the mobs satisfied.
This reveals mob dynamics' true function: not transformation but validation. The victim mob validates the rescuer mob's existence. The rescuer mob validates the victim mob's helplessness. The persecutor position provides the injustices that keep both mobilised. All receive neurochemical rewards—belonging, purpose, identity—while nothing changes. The status quo persists, maintained by triangular mobs locked in unconscious projective dance.
Genuine reciprocity requires roughly equivalent capacity for give and take. In groups small enough for individual recognition—Dunbar's sympathy group of around fifteen—each person can track relationships, remember favours, notice patterns, hold others accountable, and maintain their own reputation. This is the social technology that governed human cooperation for millennia.
But modern professional practice routinely exceeds this scale. A "team around the family" typically involves eight to ten core professionals who meet regularly, make decisions, and coordinate intervention. Beyond this core, another dozen or more individuals have peripheral involvement—managers, administrators, specialists consulted occasionally. Multi-agency meetings bring together people who barely know each other's names, let alone understand each other's roles, perspectives, or capabilities. The family at the centre encounters different professionals each week, none of whom can possibly maintain consistent relationship or genuine reciprocity.
The particularly insidious aspect of this configuration is that eight to ten professionals feels manageable. It seems small enough to be a "team." Participants believe they know each other, understand the case, coordinate effectively. Yet this number still exceeds the cognitive capacity for genuine reciprocal tracking while being small enough that dissent becomes highly visible and personally risky. It is the worst possible scale: too large for real coordination, too small for safe disagreement.
At this scale, several things break down:
First, individual accountability dissolves. When twenty professionals share responsibility for a family's welfare, no single person bears clear responsibility for outcomes. If the family does not improve, blame diffuses across the network. Everyone can point to others, to systemic constraints, to the family's own resistance. No individual must face the uncomfortable truth: perhaps nothing we do makes meaningful difference.
Second, deindividuation increases. Professionals stop being known individuals with distinct perspectives and capabilities. They become role-bearers: "the social worker," "the health visitor," "the mental health professional." The family cannot possibly maintain individual relationships with all these people. Professionals similarly cannot maintain genuine relationships with the family or each other at this scale.
Third, mob dynamics replace team coordination. The group needs simple shared narratives: "struggling family needs support," "complex case requiring multi-agency approach," "safeguarding concerns requiring monitoring." These narratives create collective identity but obscure reality. They allow the mob to maintain cohesion without genuine problem-solving or honest assessment.
The Morrison family's professional network demonstrates this pattern. If pressed, none of the eight core professionals could articulate a clear, shared understanding of the family's core problems or a coherent plan for addressing them. Each professional has their piece—education, housing, mental health, family support. But no one has the whole picture because maintaining genuine reciprocal understanding across eight to ten professionals, each with their own frameworks and priorities, exceeds cognitive capacity.
So the network functions as a mob: gathering periodically to validate shared concern, distributing impossible responsibility across several shoulders, maintaining collective fiction that intervention matters. Individual professionals may recognise the limitations—may privately acknowledge that this family will require support indefinitely regardless of intervention. But the mob cannot speak this truth.
In a group of eight where everyone knows everyone, to voice that truth means withdrawal of strokes—the psychological recognition and validation that Eric Berne identified as fundamental to human interaction. Professionals who agree with the collective narrative receive positive strokes: nods of recognition, validation of their concerns, acknowledgment of their compassion and efforts. Those who dissent face not punishment but something more subtle and more powerful: the absence of strokes. They become "difficult," "not a team player," someone who "doesn't understand the complexity." They are not attacked; they are simply not acknowledged. The stroke economy shifts, and the dissenter finds themselves blackballed—not formally, but through the quiet withdrawal of collegial validation.
Canadian-American psychiatrist and founder of Transactional Analysis (1910-1970). Author of "Games People Play" (1964), Berne identified "strokes"—units of social recognition—as fundamental human needs, as vital as food or shelter. His stroke economy theory explains how groups control behaviour through giving or withholding recognition. Positive strokes (praise, acknowledgment) reward conformity; withdrawal of strokes punishes dissent. This operates below conscious awareness, creating powerful biological pressure to maintain group consensus. The stroke economy explains why intelligent professionals remain silent even when witnessing wrongdoing.
This dynamic explains what national inquiries consistently reveal. The Post Office scandal, where hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted due to faulty Horizon software, exposed numerous professionals who knew something was wrong but said nothing. When asked why, their responses—"I didn't want to be awkward," "I didn't want to rock the boat," "I thought others knew better"—seem flippant, even culpable. But these responses reveal the power of the stroke economy: the biological and psychological cost of forfeiting collegial validation proved too high, even when the stakes involved destroyed lives and miscarriages of justice.
Contrast this with small-group helping relationships. A mentor working with a single young person. A therapist seeing an individual client. A teacher who knows their fifteen students individually. At this scale, genuine reciprocity becomes possible. The helper knows the helped well enough to notice real change or genuine stuckness. The helped knows the helper well enough to trust or reject their input meaningfully. Accountability is clear. Patterns are trackable. Honest assessment becomes possible.
Modern helping systems, by expanding beyond primate-brain processing capacity, inadvertently create conditions that prevent the very outcomes they seek. The mob forms not through malice or incompetence but through attempting to coordinate human relationships at scales our neurology was never designed to handle.
If mob behaviour represents biological compulsion toward conformity, status quo maintenance, and collective validation—what does resistance look like? And what does it cost?
The professional who looks at the Morrison family and thinks, "These people lack the capacity for independent functioning; our intervention is containment, not transformation"—this person is resisting mob consensus. The colleague who responds to parental outrage about McDonald's incidents by saying, "Life is often unfair, and this is not a crisis requiring professional intervention"—this person is refusing the rescuer role that the mob demands.
Such resistance incurs immediate costs. Other professionals may view it as harsh, unsupportive, lacking compassion. The family certainly resists, having learned that distress typically recruits rescuers. The individual standing alone must tolerate group disapproval while maintaining a position that goes against collective narrative.
This is biologically expensive. The cortisol spike of group disapproval, the isolation of standing outside collective identity, the cognitive load of resisting automatic conformity responses—all exact toll. Most professionals, most people, cannot sustain this position indefinitely. The pull toward the mob, toward shared purpose and collective validation, simply becomes too strong.
It is worth noting that formal whistleblowing mechanisms exist precisely to counteract this professional mob groupthink. While whistleblowing is often perceived within the mob system as "getting colleagues in trouble" or "policing seniors," its actual function is to provide a structural counterweight to the whirlpool of groupthink. Whistleblowing creates a sanctioned pathway for the individual to speak uncomfortable truths that the mob cannot acknowledge—offering some protection against the biological and social costs of standing alone. Yet the very existence of whistleblowing policies reveals how powerful mob dynamics are: societies recognise that without formal protection and explicit encouragement, individuals will almost never speak against group consensus, even when they know the group is wrong. The biological imperative toward conformity is so strong that legal frameworks become necessary to overcome it.
The Post Office scandal in the United Kingdom provides a stark illustration of what happens when the stroke economy mechanism cannot be named. Hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted based on faulty Horizon accounting software. The ongoing public inquiry has heard testimony from numerous Post Office executives, IT staff, and lawyers who knew or suspected problems with the system but remained silent.
The UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice (1999-2024). Between 1999 and 2015, over 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted for theft, fraud, and false accounting due to bugs in the Horizon IT system supplied by Fujitsu. Many were imprisoned, lost their homes, or took their own lives. Despite internal knowledge of system faults, Post Office executives continued prosecutions. The ongoing public inquiry (2021-2024) has exposed how professional groupthink prevented whistleblowing. Executives consistently claim "I don't recall" rather than admit they feared being seen as "difficult" or "not a team player"—demonstrating how mob dynamics operate at the highest institutional levels.
When questioned about their failure to raise concerns, the overwhelming pattern of response has been claims of ignorance: "I don't recall," "I wasn't aware," "That wasn't my responsibility." Very few, if any, have offered the honest answer that would name the actual mechanism: "I didn't want to be awkward," "I didn't want to rock the boat," "I feared losing professional validation." This absence is telling. The honest answer—admitting that the stroke economy of professional validation proved more powerful than duty or ethics—would sound flippant, like excuse-making. It would implicate not just the individual but the entire system of professional relationships that made silence feel necessary.
So instead, executives default to claimed ignorance. This strategy avoids naming the uncomfortable biological mechanism while appearing merely evasive rather than admitting to the social pressures that actually silenced them. The public watching from outside the professional whirlpool—the football stadium of observers—receives no insight into how such failures occur. They see either villains who knew and said nothing (requiring punishment) or incompetents who somehow didn't know what was happening in their own organisations (also requiring removal). Neither narrative acknowledges the universal biological vulnerability to stroke withdrawal that affects all humans in professional hierarchies.
What remains unspoken in the testimony is what would actually enable systemic learning: "I remained silent because speaking up would have meant forfeiting collegial validation, being labelled difficult, losing the professional recognition that humans evolved to require." This honest answer would identify a universal mechanism operating across all organisational contexts. But to offer this answer would be, as executives have likely been advised, "falling on your sword"—not just admitting personal failure but exposing the system of professional relationships that creates such failures.
The question "why didn't you say anything?" when asked by those outside a professional whirlpool to those who were inside it, assumes that speaking up is simply a matter of individual courage or ethics. The consistent "I don't recall" responses suggest that even in an inquiry explicitly examining systemic failure, professionals cannot or will not name the stroke economy mechanism that actually silenced them. Without naming this mechanism, we cannot design systems that account for it or prevent similar failures in future. Understanding this mechanism does not excuse the failures that led to destroyed lives and miscarriages of justice, but without understanding the mechanism, prevention remains impossible.
This is precisely why understanding mob behaviour as evolutionary adaptation rather than moral failure matters. Until we name the mechanism, we cannot design systems that account for it. Until we acknowledge that withdrawal of strokes exerts powerful biological pressure on all humans regardless of their moral character, we will continue expecting individuals to resist forces that evolution designed to be irresistible. And we will continue being surprised when they fail.
Some find middle positions. They maintain private awareness while participating publicly in collective fiction. They hold boundaries while softening messages enough to remain acceptable. They treat impossible cases as containment work requiring management rather than transformation.
But genuine breaking free—stepping outside all mob dynamics consistently—remains rare. The Morrison family's eldest son achieves it through physical escape. For professionals embedded in helping systems, such escape proves more difficult. Their employment, identity, and social networks all reinforce participation.
Few can sustain wholesale questioning of entire professional frameworks. The neurochemical rewards of belonging overwhelm intellectual recognition that much professional helping is theatre—performance that provides biological satisfaction while changing little.
We are primates living in a world we did not evolve for. Our brains, optimised for small groups where everyone knew everyone and reputation mattered daily, now encounter crowds that exceed our processing capacity by orders of magnitude. The result is not adaptation but malfunction—the same malfunction, repeated across contexts, producing mob dynamics that feel simultaneously compelling and wrong.
The compulsion to follow when others are acting in concert is not moral failure. It is hardware responding to software it was never designed to run. When the looting begins, when the professional mob forms, when the social media pile-on starts, when the workplace gossip coalition coalesces—primate brains receive overwhelming signals that safety lies in conformity and danger lies in deviation. These signals are not rational assessments. They are ancient programming screaming its warnings.
Understanding this does not provide easy solutions. We cannot return to small-group living. Modern society, with all its complexity and scale, is not going away. Professional helping systems will continue attempting to coordinate support for families across networks that exceed cognitive capacity for genuine team function. Mobs will continue forming around victims who validate collective identity. The status quo will persist, maintained by biology rather than conspiracy.
But understanding does offer perspective. The professional who recognises mob dynamics in their multi-agency meetings is not being cynical but realistic. The individual who resists collective narratives while paying the biological cost of isolation is not being difficult but honest. The Morrison family's eldest son who quietly builds his own life rather than participating in family drama is not being selfish but adaptive.
The question becomes not "How do we eliminate mob behaviour?" but "How do we live honestly within constraints we cannot change?" Perhaps the answer lies in recognising the scale problem, working to keep helping relationships small enough for genuine reciprocity, speaking truth when collective fiction demands silence, and accepting that much of what appears to be helping is actually mutual validation serving biological needs rather than transformational purposes.
The mob imperative is real, powerful, and largely unconscious. It will continue driving collective behaviour because it is written into primate neurology. The best we might manage is occasional awareness—moments when we recognise we are being pulled toward the group, toward the comforting fiction, toward the easy answer that everyone else is giving.
In those moments, the choice becomes clear: follow the group because it is easier (and it is), or stand alone because it is true (though it costs). Most of the time, most people will follow. That is what primate brains do. The rare individual who consistently chooses truth over belonging deserves recognition not as hero but as something simpler: someone willing to pay the biological price for seeing clearly.
The Morrison family will likely continue much as they are—parents cycling through crises, professionals cycling through interventions, nothing fundamental changing. The professional mob will continue meeting, discussing, planning, validating each other's compassionate concern. The eldest son will continue quietly building his escape route through school success and peer relationships.
And somewhere, a professional will sit in another multi-agency meeting, looking around at fifteen colleagues discussing a family that probably cannot change, and feel the pull toward the collective narrative warring with the recognition of reality. That professional faces a choice we all face repeatedly: maintain the comfortable fiction that keeps us part of the group, or speak the uncomfortable truth that puts us outside it.
There is no right answer. There is only the recognition that we are primates trying to do primate things—maintain group cohesion, validate shared purpose, find meaning in collective action—in a world that has grown far beyond the scale our brains were built to handle. The mob is not aberration. It is what happens when ancient hardware encounters modern scale.
Perhaps wisdom lies not in trying to transcend our primate nature but in recognising it clearly enough to make informed choices about when to follow the group and when to stand alone. Both have their place. Both exact their costs. The tragedy is not that mobs form—biology ensures they will. The tragedy is that we so often mistake collective validation for meaningful change, and biological satisfaction for genuine helping.
The looting continues because it is easier to loot when everyone else is looting. The professional mob persists because it is easier to maintain collective fiction than speak individual truth. The victim remains victim because both victim and rescuers receive neurochemical rewards from the dynamic. And all of it is driven not by malice or stupidity but by primate brains doing exactly what they evolved to do, just at entirely the wrong scale.
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