The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (
Psychologie des Foules; literally: Psychology of Crowds) is a book authored by
Gustave Le Bon (7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) that was first published in
1895. (English, 1896)
From 1871 on, Le Bon was an avowed opponent of
socialist pacifists and
protectionists, who he believed were halting France's martial development and stifling her industrial growth; stating in 1913: "Only people with lots of cannons have the right to be pacifists." He also warned his countrymen of the deleterious effects of political rivalries in the face of German military might and rapid industrialisation, and therefore was uninvolved in the
Dreyfus Affair which dichotomised France.
Le Bon's behavioural study of horses also sparked a long-standing interest in
psychology, and in 1894 he released L
ois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples. This work was dedicated to his friend
Charles Richet though it drew much from the theories of
Théodule-Armand Ribot, to whom Le Bon dedicated
Psychologie des Foules (1895). Psychologie des Foules was in part a summation of Le Bon's 1881 work
L'Homme et les sociétés—which
Émile Durkheim referenced in his doctoral dissertation
De la division du travail social.
Convinced that human actions are guided by eternal laws, Le Bon attempted to synthesise
Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer with
Jules Michelet and
Alexis de Tocqueville.
According to
Steve Reicher, Le Bon was not the first
crowd psychologist: "The first debate in crowd psychology was actually between two
criminologists,
Scipio Sighele and
Gabriel Tarde, concerning how to determine and
assign criminal responsibility within a crowd and hence who [sic] to arrest." While this previous attribution may be valid, it is worth pointing out that Le Bon specified that the
influence of crowds was
not only a negative phenomena [sic], but
could also have a positive impact. He considered this as a shortcoming from those authors who only considered the criminal aspect of crowd psychology.
Le Bon theorised that the
new entity, the "psychological crowd", which emerges from incorporating the assembled population not only forms a new body but also creates a
collective "unconsciousness". As a group of people gather together and coalesces to form a crowd, there is a "magnetic influence given out by the crowd" that transmutes
every individual's behaviour until it becomes governed by the "group mind". This model treats the crowd as a unit in its composition which
robs every individual member of their opinions, values and beliefs; as Le Bon states: "An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will".
In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of
crowd psychology:
"impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others..." Le Bon claimed that "an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the
hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer."
Le Bon detailed three key processes that create the psychological crowd:
i) Anonymity, ii) Contagion and iii) Suggestibility. Anonymity provides to rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility. An individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional. This lack of self-restraint allows individuals to "yield to instincts" and to accept the instinctual drives of their "
racial unconscious". For Le Bon, the crowd inverts Darwin's law of evolution and becomes
atavistic, proving
Ernst Haeckel's embryological theory: "
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Contagion refers to the spread in the crowd of particular behaviours and individuals sacrifice their personal interest for the collective interest. Suggestibility is the mechanism through which the contagion is achieved; as the crowd coalesces into a singular mind, suggestions made by strong voices in the crowd create a space for the racial unconscious to come to the forefront and guide its behaviour. At this stage, the psychological crowd becomes homogeneous and malleable to suggestions from its strongest members. "The leaders we speak of," says Le Bon, "are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen foresight... They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness."
Ignored or maligned by sections of the French academic and scientific establishment during his life due to his politically
conservative and
reactionary views,
Gustave Le Bon was
critical of democracy and
socialism. Le Bon's works were influential to such disparate figures as
Theodore Roosevelt and
Benito Mussolini,
Sigmund Freud and
José Ortega y Gasset,
Adolf Hitler and
Vladimir Lenin.
On religion, ideology, and fanaticism:
A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions. Intolerance and fanaticism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardour proceeded from the same source.
The myth of the angry mob:
Le Bon’s book, a
bestseller in its time, has shaped popular understandings of crowd psychology ever since — even though it’s been
largely discredited by over a century of psychological research. In fact, the latest work on mob psychology
shows that “crowds are highly supportive, altruistic, friendly, and often fun places to be.” Crowds
raise hundreds of millions of dollars for people with severe medical expenses not covered by insurance. They make concerts, festivals and weddings fun and enjoyable.
What’s more,
even if participating in a collective effort emboldens them, people who join crowds remain very much in control of their actions. “An individual in a crowd behaves just as he would behave alone,” psychologist Floyd Allport
argued in 1924, “only more so.” Nevertheless, the stereotype of the angry, unreasoning mob remains an object of terror and fascination in American culture. During the 1920s and 1930s, proto-fascist crowds — such as
Ku Klux Klan parades or the
pro-Nazi rallies of the German-American Bund — understandably came in for the most criticism. In reality, though,
these crowds were menacing mostly because of the
ideology of their members. A
Klan rally was terrifying because it was made up of Klansmen, not because those Klansmen were together in a crowd.
But by the
1960s,
fear of the angry mob became a
tool to attack grass-roots organizing in the civil rights movement and student antiwar protests.
Ultimately, the myth of the angry mob serves to justify
conservatives’ indifference to the outrage of those they disagree with. Classifying protesters as a mob rather than citizens engaging in democratic activity allows
Republicans RepuGNicans to raise the specter of mob rule to avoid meeting their constituents’ needs. The result: They’re the ones doing violence to democracy. There’s nothing quite so irrational, so irresponsible or so dangerous as an entire political party trying to convince voters that sexual assault survivors confronting their senators constitute an “angry mob.”
...
It is the crowd—this late-19th-century creature theorized by
Le Bon, then ridden by the likes of Mussolini and Hitler (both of whom read the Frenchman’s work)—that Idiot-in-Chief has apparently resurrected.
But here’s the rub:
“le crowd” is, in part, a mythical creature. As contemporary sociologists and psychologists like Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews,
argue,
the crowd is less a feature of the modern political landscape than a creature of Le Bon’s private nightscape.
Rather than surrendering their identity or losing themselves in the crowd, as Le Bon argued, individuals who join the group instead embrace a collective identity, one usually hedged by limits and informed by rules. In his work on riots in 18th-century England, the historian E.P. Thompson revealed how these
so-called mobs were, in fact, governed by what he called a “moral economy.” Similarly, in his landmark work on crowds in the French Revolution, the historian George Rudé showed how
the “mob” that took the Bastille was not bestial and base, but instead shaped by the actions of literate artisans.
Nor is it, as Reicher argues, that crowds are entities that exist outside of a specific social context. They are, instead,
responses to specific events and shaped (and limited) by the various concerns of those who form a crowd. There is no social alchemy that creates a single or collective “mind,” but instead an
aggregate of individuals who, to widely varying degrees, follow or ignore the leaders. [In other words, individuals choose their mob.
Xenophobic bigots revel in Racist-in-Chief rallies precisely because they
already share DUH's
malevolent worldview.]
"The most popular theory was that rioters had surrendered their self-awareness and rationality to the mentality of the crowd.
This has been the overriding view of crowd behaviour since the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille. The
19th-century French criminologist Gabriel Tarde likened even the most civilised of crowds to ‘a monstrous worm whose sensibility is diffuse and who still acts with disordered movements according to the dictates of its head’. Tarde’s contemporary, the
social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, tried to explain crowd behaviour as a paralysis of the brain; hypnotised by the group, the individual becomes the slave of unconscious impulses. ‘He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will,’ he wrote in 1895. ‘Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian… a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’
This is still the prevailing view of mob behaviour, but it turns out to be wrong. In recent years, social psychologists have found that, rather than surrendering rationality and self-awareness, people in crowds define themselves according to who they are with at the time; their social identity determines how they behave.
At the University of Sussex, researchers led by the social psychologist John Drury have coined the term ‘collective resilience’, an attitude of mutual helping and unity in the midst of danger, to describe how crowds under duress often behave. There are many documented examples of this. ... In each case, most of Drury’s interviewees recalled feeling a strong sense of togetherness during the crisis, and an inclination to help strangers. Without such co-operation, the casualty rates could have been far higher, says Drury, who refers to crowds as ‘the fourth emergency service’ – an attitude not often shared by police. In Drury’s view, it is wrong-headed to blame crowd disasters on the behaviour of the crowd. More often the real problem is poor organisation – too many people in one place – or inadequate venue design."
