We don’t often think about how things end. And that’s a shame.
Take riots for example. They start how? Well, we have plenty of theories about that. Grievance, provocation, the first brick, dark forces and bad actors. Most of which theories are, as we’ve argued here and elsewhere, just plain wrong.
It pays to go to the other end of the timeline: how do riots end? Nobody calls a meeting. Nobody issues a rebuttal. The behaviour just loses its social energy and stops. One person stops for whatever reason. Then another. The signal shifts and the crowd moves with it.
No argument required. No evidence presented. No participative forum.
And yet when we talk about changing deeply embedded collective behaviour (a movement, a cult, a political tribe) we reach instinctively for argument as the solution. For evidence. For confrontation. For the tools that have never once ended a riot.
Why do we keep doing that? Because it’s easier? Because it’s familiar? Because we imagine that’s what history teaches us.
When you are facing an example of mass behaviour like this, the question we ask shouldn’t be how do we counter this. It’s how does anything like this ever end? And once you ask it that way, the way forward looks very different.
Steve Lacey’s recent work on right-wing populism gets us part of the way. His core finding that this isn’t a monolith of angry men but a set of people whose lived experience has found an explanation that fits is the right diagnosis. The silent hotel on the edge of town. The faces that don’t look familiar. An explanation that matches the texture of what actually happened to you is hard to argue with. Lacey is right that you can’t fact-check your way out of this.
But he’s also pointing at something deeper than politics. These movements offer what a good “firm” or “crew” (as the hardcore football fan calls it) offers. What the sentiment of the “away end” offers. What any tight scaffolding for belonging offers the reassurance that comes not from being told everything will be fine, but from being surrounded by people who see and feel the world the same way you do. The chant, the colours, the in-jokes, the shared contempt for the referee, these are all shared behavioural markers. Remember, belonging that is felt in the body before it is articulated in the mind. This is what makes it sticky. And this is what makes argument so useless against it. You are not shifting a view. You are asking someone to leave their people. Their “crew”.
The literature on getting people to exit cults is useful here. The researchers and practitioners who spend their lives getting people out of closed, high-control movements have learned, mostly the hard way, that confrontation fails. Just as piles of evidence fails. And high-minded moral pressure fails. Not because the
people inside are stupid or irredeemable. But rather because the belief system isn’t really the point. It’s the container.
What’s inside is a real sense of belonging, significance, a story about why the life went the way it did and oh, all that embodied emotion. Challenge the ideology and you’ve missed what you’re actually dealing with.
What works is different. Staying in relationship with the cult member. Not making them choose. Asking questions that surface their own doubts rather than supplying yours. And, most importantly and most simply, being a visible social fact. Someone recognisable, from the same tribe, already shifting somewhere else. Not someone lecturing. Not someone better or smarter. Just someone like me.
People don’t join movements because they’ve been persuaded. They join because people like them are joining. They stay because people like them stay. And they leave in the same way. The identity piece – who are you? who are you? – comes before the ideology. That’s why the way out isn’t a better argument. It’s a better social signal. Someone from the same town, the same background, the same crew visibly, quietly, already gone.
The behaviour changes direction the same way it always does. Not through argument but through the social signals shifting. Through the interaction of humans.
One person stops. Then another. Then another.
And yet, almost nobody leaves in one go. So you as a change agent, you need to stay available, patient and present, a different kind of belonging made visible until the crowd starts moving the other way.
Gradually, then suddenly.
HERDspotting Tips
Watch For the way social motivations do the real recruiting and retention. The crew, the colours, the sense of moving with people like you, the buzz of the away end. The argument comes later, if at all to justify what belonging already decided.
Listen For the feckless wheel-spin of reason the louder and faster the argument, the more it’s covering for something else. And for the quieter, slower power underneath: social learning, status, the pull of people whose good opinion matters to you.
Reflect On the things that once seemed inevitable. The movements, the moments, the ideas that burned so bright in their growth and peak. And how quickly, how quietly, they drifted away. No argument ended them either.
References & Further Reading
Earls, M. (2015) Copy, Copy, Copy. Wiley.
Hassan, S. (1990) Combating Cult Mind Control. Park Street Press.
Lacey, S. (2025) ‘Right-wing populism is not a monolith of angry men’. Research Live.
Newson, M. et al. (2017) Football, fan violence, and identity fusion. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 54(4).
