The psychologists Clifford Stott and Steven Reicher have studied the 2011 London riots in response to a police shooting, the 2019 protests and riots in Hong Kong, and riots related to soccer hooliganism in the 1990s. Their research has found that despite the disparate motivations of these groups, the vast majority of participants behaved rationally and engaged in self-policing to keep rowdier members from instigating violence. This remained true even when rogue actors got into altercations with police. But as soon as the police were perceived to have engaged in illegitimate violence—when they
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