To protest or not to protest?

With the Anti-CAS protest to be held on the 8th of September at Centrepoint, many will wonder what will the turn out be like? A typical view would be that Singaporeans will only talk but not act and that only a tiny crowd will show up.

However, i would think that the mechanics of how many turn up at the protest works like this:

People seek to act in a manner that yields the highest benefit to cost ratio

based on available information

So what exactly does this mean? Consider the crowd as a single entity. Whether this entity takes part in the protest or not depends on

A) The benefits of taking part in the protest (eg. perceived empowerment, no need to fork out money for the CAS if protest works etc.)

B) The costs of taking part in the protest (eg. time spent attending the protest, potential to be arrested by police etc.)

A and B is then aggregated and if the benefits outweighs the cost, then the crowd will take part in the protest. If the costs outweighs the benefits, then obviously the crowd will not take part in the protest.

In addition to aggregating the benefits and costs, the crowd has to assign a weightage, value, or significance to each individual cost and benefit. And how much value it assigns to each cost or benefit would depend on the information it has.

For example if it is known that thousands upon thousands of people were interest in joining the protest, perhaps because they somehow were able to communicate effectively with one another and got an accurate idea of the scale of the turn out, leading to the number of protesters outnumbering the riot police by say 50 to 1. This means that effectively, the riot police cannot arrest all of them and send them to jail. With this piece of information, a great chunk from the "cost" part of the equation will be negated.

On the contrary if say the crowd got a feel that the turn out would be poor, and that each individual has a high chance of getting arrested, the "cost" part of the equation is greatly amplified.

And this is why information is so important. You control the information, you control the crowd.

You want to stop the crowd from protesting, you block out news coverage on the planned event. Generate a feel that the turn out will be poor. Generate a feel that the police will be on the ball. Amplify the cost of protesting in the minds of the crowd and diminish the benefits in the minds of the crowd. As they say, knowledge is power.