Making crowd 'guesstimates?' Guess again, and lower
By University of Illinois
Monday January 12, 2009
On the Inauguration Crowd: A Minute with Sociologist Clark McPhail
From the UI: The crowd showing up Jan. 20 for the Obama inauguration could be the largest in U.S. history, according to some news reports. Estimates have run as high as 4 million. Clark McPhail, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois, knows that size estimates before, during or after an event usually are "guesstimates," and often hugely inflated. The author of the book "The Myth of the Madding Crowd," he has been studying crowds and crowd behavior since the 1960s, and advising people who manage them.
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