Collective psychology

“ These springs are all labelled: they form a keyboard to the human psyche, according to modern psychology. And the chief labels are herd instinct, collective interest, hunger, fear, collective prestige, and so on.
But the only way to make any study of collective psychology is to study the isolated individual. Upon your conception of the single individual, all your descriptions will be based, all your science established. For this reason, the human sciences, philosophy, ethics, psychology, politics, economics, can never be sciences at all. ”

“ If we pass by these serious difficulties, others arise as soon as we inquire what kinds of human groups have such ‘collective consciousness.’ Does the simple fortuitously gathered crowd possess it? Or is it confined to highly organised groups such as the leading modern nations? If every psychological crowd possesses it and owes its peculiarities of behaviour to it, does it come into being at the moment the individuals have their attention attracted to a common object and begin to be stirred by a common emotion? ”

“ HETEROGENEOUS CROWDS It is these collectivities whose characteristics have been studied in this volume. They are composed of individuals of any description, of any profession, and any degree of intelligence.
We are now aware that by the mere fact that men form part of a crowd engaged in action, their collective psychology differs essentially from their individual psychology, and their intelligence is affected by this differentiation. We have seen that intelligence is without influence in collectivities, they being solely under the sway of unconscious sentiments. ”

“ There is, however, some difference between the manifestation of the activity of a group of men and that of the aggregate society. Between psychology which studies the individual, and sociology which studies the society, I think there is room for a collective psychology, to study more or less defined groups. ”

“ Then it at once became apparent that both these processes are essentially social; that they involve, and at every step are determined by, interactions between the individual and his social environment; that, while the growth of the individual mind is [Pg 6] moulded by the mental forces of the society in which it grows up, those forces are in turn the products of the interplay of the minds composing the society; that, therefore, we can only understand the life of individuals and the life of societies, if we consider them always in relation to one another. ”

“ Collective psychology has its field of observation in all unions, however occasional, such as the public street, the markets, workshops, theatres meetings, assemblies, colleges, schools, barracks, prisons, and so forth. Many practical applications of the data of collective psychology might be given. ”

“ Collective thought and feeling, and collective accomplishment, are relatively easy in [454] comparison with individual function and performance; a fact that is only too prone to lead to a fining down to the collective level, and is peculiarly disastrous to personal development. The concomitant loss of personality is replaced—as is always the case in psychology—by an unconscious all-compelling binding to and identification with the collective psyche. ”

“ Viewed from the standpoint of custom and its priority to the formation of habits in human beings who are born babies and gradually grow to maturity, the facts which are now usually assembled under the conceptions of collective minds, group-minds, national-minds, crowd-minds, etc., etc., lose the mysterious air they exhale when mind is thought of (as orthodox psychology teaches us to think of it) as something which precedes action. It is difficult to see that collective mind means anything more than a custom brought at some point to explicit, emphatic consciousness, emotional or intellectual. ”

“ The repression of the collective psyche, in so far as it was conscious, was a necessity for the development of the personality, because collective psychology and personal psychology are in a certain sense irreconcilable. In the history of thought, whenever a fresh psychological attitude acquires collective value the formation of schisms begins. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the history of religion. A collective point of view, although it may be necessary, is always dangerous for the individual. It is dangerous because it is apt to choke and smother personal differentiation. ”

“ What collective mental life it has is on the plane of impulse and unregulated desire. Such ideas as are widely accepted may determine collective action; but such action is not the result of the weighing of ideas in the light of self-consciousness; hence they are little adapted to promote the welfare of the nation, and, because there is no organisation adapted for their expression, they can be but imperfectly realised. ”

“ The unorganised crowd presents many of the fundamental phenomena of collective psychology in relative simplicity; whereas the higher the degree of organisation of a group, the more complicated is its psychology. We shall, therefore, study first the mental peculiarities of the unorganised crowd, and shall then go on to consider the modifications resulting from a simple and definite type of organisation.
Not every mass of human beings gathered together in one place within sight and sound of one another constitutes a crowd in the psychological sense of the word. ”

“ In short, the primary facts of social psychology center about collective habit, custom. In addition to the general psychology of habit—which is general not individual in any intelligible sense of that word—we need to find out just how different customs shape the desires, beliefs, purposes of those who are affected by them. The problem of social psychology is not how either individual or collective mind forms social groups and customs, but how different customs, established interacting arrangements, form and nurture different minds. ”

“ Society like the kingdom of God is within us. Within us, within each of us, and yet greater than the thoughts and understandings of any of us. For the social thoughts and feelings and willings of each, the socialised mind of each, with the complex scheme of his relation to the social world, is no mere reproduction of the social thoughts and feelings and willings of the rest. ”

“ All eyes are turned upon the fire-engine or coach; the attention of all is directed to the same object; all experience in some degree the same emotion, and the state of mind of each person is in some degree [Pg 23] affected by the mental processes of all those about him. Those are the fundamental conditions of collective mental life. In its more developed forms, an awareness of the crowd or group as such in the mind of each member plays an important part ”

“ Only when the general principles of group life have been applied to the understanding of particular societies, of nations and the manifold system of groups within the nation, will it be possible for Social Psychology to return upon the individual life and give of it an adequate account in all its concrete fulness. ”

“ It cannot be denied, and should be warningly emphasized that in the analysis of the unconscious, the collective psychology is merged into the personal psychology, with the afore-mentioned unpleasant consequences. ”

“ Since, then, the social aggregate has a collective mental life, which is not merely the sum of the mental lives of its units, it may be contended that a society not only enjoys a collective mental life but also has a collective mind or, as some prefer to say, a collective soul. ”

“ In adopting a so far unsympathetic attitude towards this doctrine, we ought to admit that, if there be any truth in it, the ‘collective consciousness’ of even the most highly organised society may be still in a rudimentary stage, and that it may continue to gain in effectiveness and organisation with the further evolution of the society in question. ”

“ The crushing predominance of what is collective should make us realise what peculiar care and attention must be given to the delicate plant "individuality," if it is to develop.
Human beings have a capacity which is of the utmost use for purposes of collectivism and most prejudicial to individuation, and that is the capacity to imitate. ”

“ He argues that each such society of blood-relatives is a harmonious whole only because it enjoys a ‘collective consciousness’ over and above the consciousnesses of its constituent members; that, for example, a swarm of bees, which exhibits so great a uniformity of feeling and action and of which all the members come from the body of one parent, is in reality the material basis of a ‘collective consciousness,’ which presides over and is expressed by their collective actions ”

“ The natural conditions of group self-consciousness, which in primitive societies rendered its development inevitable and spontaneous in every man, have then been in the main destroyed. But man cannot stand alone; men cannot live happily as mere individuals; they desire and crave and seek membership in a group, in whose collective opinions and emotions and self-consciousness and activities they may share, with which they may identify themselves, thereby lessening the burden of individual responsibility, judgment, decision and effort. ”

“ This is the peculiar merit and efficiency of the complex motives that arise from the group spirit; they bring the egoistic self-seeking impulses into the service of society and harmonise them with the altruistic tendencies. The group spirit secures that the egoistic and the altruistic tendencies of each man’s nature, instead of being in perpetual conflict, as they must be in its absence, shall harmoniously co-operate and re-enforce one another throughout a large part of the total field of human activity. ”

“ The development of the group spirit in general and of national self-consciousness in particular is favoured by, and indeed dependent upon, conditions similar to those which develop the self-consciousness of individuals. Here is another striking point of the analogy between the individual and the national mind. Passing over other conditions, let us notice one, the most important of all. The individual’s consciousness of self is developed chiefly by intercourse with other individuals—by imitation, by conflict, by compulsion, and by co-operation. ”

“ We have seen that, in the well-organised group, collective deliberation, judgment, and action are raised to a higher plane of effectiveness than is possible to the average member of the group. But apart from that, the group spirit continues with us, as with the savage (though in a less effective degree) to be the great socialising agency. In the majority of cases it is the principal, if not the sole, factor which raises a man’s conduct above the plane of pure egoism, leads him to think and care and work for others as well as for himself. ”

“ A second condition, which co-operates with the foregoing to keep the intellectual processes of crowds at a low level, is the increased suggestibility of its members. Here is one of the most striking facts of collective mental life. A crowd impresses each of its members with a sense of its power, its unknown capacities, its unlimited and mysterious possibilities; and these, as I have shown in Chapter III of my Social Psychology, are the attributes that excite in us the instinct of subjection and so throw us into the receptive suggestible attitude towards the object that displays them. ”

“ Further, the motives supplied by the group spirit may be stronger than, and may overpower, the purely individualistic egoistic motives, just because they harmonise with, and are supported by, any altruistic tendency or tendencies comprised in the make up of the individual; which altruistic tendencies will, where the group spirit is lacking, oppose and weaken the effects of purely egoistic motives. ”

“ It follows that not every aggregation of individuals is capable of becoming a psychological crowd and of enjoying a collective life. For the individuals must be capable of being interested in the same objects and of being affected in a similar way by them; there must be a certain degree of similarity of mental constitution among the individuals, a certain mental homogeneity of the group. Let a man stand on a tub in the midst of a gathering of a hundred Englishmen and proceed to denounce and abuse England; those individuals at once become a crowd. ”

“ In this way too, with the increase of these stored values, of which members realise parts but none the whole, the spirit of a people more and more surpasses the measure of any individual mind. It is these social forces within and without, working in the minds of individuals whose own social inheritance is an essential part of their individuality, stored in the institutions which they maintain from the past or establish in the present, that mould the communal spirit of the successive generations. ”

“ We may fairly define a mind as an organised system of mental or purposive forces; and, in the sense so defined, every highly organised human society may properly be said to possess a collective mind. For the collective actions which constitute the history of any such society are conditioned by an organisation which can only be described in terms of mind, and which yet is not comprised within the mind of any individual; the society is rather constituted by the system of relations obtaining between the individual minds which are its units of composition. ”