Order! Order!

Now Watching

Earlier this week, I was at a dinner party where I heard this extraordinary story. One of the guests had been invited to attend the recent Arsenal-PSV Eindhoven match. He's not an avid football supporter, but faced with the excitement of the game, he cheered when Eindhoven scored their 83rd minute goal. Apparently he was the only one in the box to do so. Immediately, he and the other members of his party, which included the Arsenal season-ticket holder who had invited him, were asked to leave the box and the game. I think it didn't help that he is Dutch. One of the other dinner guests, a keen football fan, expressed approval at this decision ("Most rightful judge! The court awards it and the law doth give it") explaining that as an Eindhoven supporter (which he is not) he shouldn't have been in that part of the stadium (tough call when you are invited there as a guest).

freedom of expression (but just not around here)

When questioned why this should be, she gave examples of supporters getting beaten up because they were in the wrong part of the stadium, explained the proscription of sartorial choices in specified parts of the ground "you can't wear that shirt/scarf in here" because they might also get beaten up, but suggested that there were 'neutral' parts of the ground available for types like him, who wished to express an independent opinion.

kick him out because such behaviour has incited violence in the past

When this debate was broadened to the general condition of whether it was acceptable to kick him out because violence (or the fear of it) could be used to enforce normative behaviour - we were relieved to hear that she thought that "violence was unacceptable" though we were treated to colourful examples of how in any case, you shouldn't tempt fate where there is a risk of physical violence: "you don't go flashing a Rolex in downtown Johannesburg". The discussion in its general form then centered around the transgressing of micro-social norms (ie. is it socially unacceptable to cheer for the opposing team when you are not surrounded by the opposing team's supporters?). She proposed that it was trangression of these norms that made it correct to segregate supporters and remove those who don't adhere to these norms.

segregate supporters to maintain in-group cohesion

Analysis In order to characterise reasonable choices, one uses the concept of preference relations. Without getting into broader issues about the debate (like the tacit acceptance of violence), I was fascinated by her ordering of the following choices:

1. protection of minority expression
2. fear of the threat of violence
3. maintenance of in-group cohesion

2 and 3 can co-exist, of course, but it's the ordering of these preferences by her that is important, as it seems to violate contraction consistency. Amartya Sen's contraction condition states that if you have a set of choices from which you express a preferred choice, and subsequently have a reduced set that also includes your original choice, then your preference will stay the same. But here we have:

• 123 -> 2 (private box condition)
• 23 -> 3 (general condition)

This could be explained by Herbert Simon's 'satisficing criterion', where the threshold utility for adequacy of an alternative can be less than the maximum attainable from the set (eg. faced with the purchase from a range of 99 different personal computers, you are satisfied with not going into a rigorous analysis to find the perfect choice). But this applies to large sets, not the simple case we have here. Of course, the broader issue here was the value of artificial in-group creation, which she was wholly in favour of, at least in the case of (British) football. The situation she describes is an excellent example of this, both in its use of physical separation (supporters in different parts of the grounds) and the threat of unfair distribution of resources (only one winner from the game) and these and their consequences are well-documented in the literature (eg. Sherif's Robber's Cave 1961, Blake and Mouton 1979). Needless to say, as the evening wore on and the trees were darkly swayed, Godwin's Law was also obeyed.