"The thing that's so distinctive about the London riots … and different from past riots that behavioral scientists have written about, is that the convergence of rioters now is of heterogeneous actors, with different motives: some acting on political motives, others to loot, still others to engage in wild and crazy behavior," Goode wrote in an email. "So it's difficult to theorize about similar behavior … that is caused by very different impulses."
Simon Moore, a researcher with the Violence & Society Research Group at Cardiff University in Wales, thinks there's one factor that may be uniting all the rioters: The perception that they have low status. In research he conducted last year with colleagues at the University of Warwick, Moore found that low economic rank — being poorer than others in the same geographic region — rather than actual poverty, which is defined as not being able to afford things you need, elicits misery.
Along with misery, a fair amount of research has found that low status also leads to feelings of animosity, Moore said. "[Yet] another area of work suggests low status elicits stress, and this is implicated in aggression," he wrote in an email.
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