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I was slightly nervous when I arrived at Starbucks a few minutes after 3 o'clock on March 7. I had never seriously interviewed anyone before this, and I had no idea what to expect. I looked around but I didn't see Nancy Ulmer, the psychologist I was meeting for an interview. Relieved that I made it to Starbucks on time, I ordered myself a chocolate frappucino and sat down at a small table near the back to think of some extra questions before my interview. A couple minutes later, Nancy showed up, looked around, and walked swiftly over to my table. We already vaguely knew each other from my being in her daughter Rachel's class in elementary school. All around us, Starbucks was buzzing with customers thirsty for grande mocha lattes, and at times it was hard to hear her. We were interrupted occasionally by the loud buzzing of coffee beans being ground for a new batch of coffee. We exchanged a quick hello and got right down to business. The first thing I noticed about her was her gold heart necklace. She had a tired-out look on her face, like she had too much stuff to do in too little time. She wore dark blue clothing that covered most of her body. She had short brown hair and wore little or no makeup. Nancy Ulmer first got interested in group psychology when she studied abnormal psychology in college. She majored in sociology and psychology, and is now a practicing psychologist in the Bay Area. As I sipped my frappucino and asked her questions, she seemed very comfortable and eager to help me with my research. When asked if knowing about mob psychology has influenced the way she thinks about crowds, she responded "No, I think it’s the other way around. I think knowing about peoples’ inner psychology has made me think about what makes mob psychology." Nancy talked about two different kinds of people who join crowds. She talked about people who join because it represents something they like, for example, a sports team. The other reason she gave was that people join because they don’t have a sense of individuality and the crowds tell them who they are. Next, we talked about a movie she had suggested to me on the phone and that I had seen the night before: The Crucible. The movie is about the Salem witch trials and the mob hysteria that surrounded it. The "mob" in the movie is lead by a very charismatic girl, and we talked about why she had control over everyone else. "The people who followed her didn’t have a full sense of themselves, and so they projected kind of all their badness." She briefly talked about the people who got together to protest the Vietnam War. She said that people believed in the cause against the war so much that they were willing to give themselves over to a larger force. When asked about survival instincts, she gave stampedes as an example. Stampedes, she says, happen when people feel threaten and have a need for the safety of a large group. "In a positive way, groups give people a chance to do things they couldn't do on their own." She went into detail about Beatlemania and the way people identified with the new possibilities Beatles music created. Girls would be swooning and fainting over the Beatles, and doing anything to get tickets, partly because everyone else was doing the same thing. One of the most interesting points she noted was the Jonestown massacre. The people at Jonestown were California residents who were lured to a discreet South American jungle by a charismatic reverend. They started a sort of colony, but many of the people were abused and battered. She talked about the mass suicide involving poisoned Kool-Aid that killed 913 people, and the very strange way everyone took part in it. No one questioned their leader, Jim Jones; they just obeyed his brutal commands. They all lost their sense of intelligence and foresight, just going along with everyone because if lots of people were doing it, there had to be a good reason for it. I ran out of questions sooner than I expected. Still, we talked quite a bit more about mob psychology, and I learned a lot more from her after I had finished with my questions. We chatted about the Space Walkers cult from Texas who committed mass suicide and who were all led to believe that they would have a rendezvous with extraterrestrial spacecraft. When they committed suicide they all had change in their pockets for a bus ride in the afterlife. All this crazy stuff was force-fed to the followers of another charismatic fanatical leader. These people where brainwashed and acted like sheep, obeying all of their leaders commands. She kept going over her three main examples: Beatlemania, Jonestown, and the Texas Space Walkers cult. She gave a lot of short answers for my early questions, but went more in to depth later on. We soon ran out of stuff to talk about, and we slowly digressed from the subject of Mob Psychology to where my sister was going to college. I quickly wrapped up the interview and thanked her. Then she checked her watch, said that she needed to go right away, and hastily left Starbucks. The interview left me with plenty of useful leads and ideas of where to research next. She didn't really tell me any new facts that I didn't know before, but it was definately worthwhile. I was satisfied with the information I got from her, and I was able to find out great stuff about mob psychology through the Jonestown mass-suicide. You can read my findings in the Mob Psychology: For Dummies portion of my website.
The Questions I Asked Her
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