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Sep 28

Mob Rule!

By Jay Slupesky
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Travels with the Therapist


Qaqortoq, Greenland

I’ve seen some “crowd psychology” at work on this cruise ship, and I find it to be both fascinating and repugnant.

It seems that when you get a group of about four or more men doing something together, such as watching a performance in the theater or playing a trivia game, they begin to do and say things they wouldn’t dream of saying or doing if they weren’t in a group. Normal inhibitions go out the window and being boorish and/or crude becomes the norm. I suppose alcohol consumption is also a factor in this behavior.

The facts that (1) I don’t drink at all and (2) I don’t like the crowd-type behavior are enough to keep me out of situations like this.

We have played some trivia games, though, and in fact we won the Beatles trivia contest, scoring a perfect 21 out of 21. The moderator asked if anyone in the crowd had ever seen the Beatles perform, and I was one of three who had been to a Beatles concert (I saw them in Indianapolis in September, 1964).

We are now heading almost due south from Greenland to St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada and are scheduled to arrive there on Monday morning. I see that Hurricane Kyle is heading north up the Atlantic coast to greet us! However, right now it looks like the hurricane is going to make landfall in Maine, and so I think it will pass to the west of us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Travels with the Therapist.

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