Crowd behavior

“ People may be social—the family is an example of this—without being a crowd either in thought or action. Again a crowd—a mob is an example of this—may be distinctly antisocial, if we attach any ethical meaning to the term. Both the individual and society suffer, as we shall see, from crowd-behavior. I know of nothing which to-day so menaces not only the values of civilization, but also—it is the same thing in other words, perhaps—the achievement of personality and true knowledge of self, as the growing habit of behaving as crowds. ”

“ No one that I saw was even affected by drink, and no one was guilty of any rude or unseemly behavior. The crowd was, in short, a monument to the democratic ideal of life in that very important expression of life, personal conduct, I have not any notion who or what the people were, or how virtuous or vicious they privately might be; but I am sure that no society assemblage could be of a goodlier outside; and to be of a goodly outside is all that the mere spectator has a right to ask of any crowd. ”

“ Everyone is forced to [8] speak as the crowd, think as the crowd, understand as the crowd. The tendency is to smother all that is unique, rare, delicate, secret. If you are to get anywhere in this progressive age you must be vulgar, you must add to your vulgarity unction. You must take sides upon dilemmas which are but half true, change the tempo of your music to ragtime, eat your spiritual food with a knife, drape yourself in the flag of the dominant party. In other words, you must be "one hundred per cent" crowd man. ”

“ Many of our crowd-phenomena belong, like paranoia, to this last class.
As I shall try to show later, the common confusion of the crowd with "society" is an error. The crowd is a social phenomenon only in the sense that it affects a number of persons at the same time. As I have indicated, people may be highly social without becoming a crowd. They may meet, mingle, associate in all sorts of ways, and organize and co-operate for the sake of common ends—in fact, the greater part of our social life might normally have nothing in common with crowd-behavior. ”

“ Not all crowd-movements, however, are local and temporary. There are passing moments of crowd-experience which are often too sweet to lose. The lapse into everyday realism is like "falling from grace." ”

“ Let the crowd yell itself hoarse, chanting its abstract nouns made out of adjectives, the humanist will know that these are but words and that the realities which they point to, if they have any meaning at all, are what "they are known as." ”

“ Crowd-making oratory is almost invariably platitudinous. In fact, we think as a crowd only in platitudes, propaganda, ritual, dogma, and symbol. Crowd-ideas are ready-made, they possess finality and universality. They are fixed. They do not develop. They are ends in themselves. Like the obsessions of the insane, there is a deadly inevitability in the logic of them. ”

“ We have seen that the crowd-mind as such is a device for "kidding" ourselves, for representing the easiest path to the enhancement of our self-feeling as something highly moral, for making our personal right appear like universal righteousness, for dressing up our will to lord it over others, as if it were devotion to impersonal principle. ”

“ Every organized crowd is jealous of its dignity and honor and is bent upon keeping up appearances. Nothing is more fatal to it than a successful assault upon its prestige. Every crowd, even the casual street mob, clothes the egoistic desires of its members or participants in terms of the loftiest moral motive. ”

“ Even an honest critical understanding of the demands of the opposing crowd is discouraged, possibly because it is rightly felt that the critical habit of mind is as destructive of one crowd-complex as the other and the old crowd prefers to remain intact and die in the last ditch rather than risk dissolution, even with the promise of averting a revolution. ”

“ Those who expect to find a prescribed formula or ideal scheme of organization as a remedy for our social ills may feel that the solution to which I have come—namely, a new educational method—is too vague. But the problem of the crowd is really concerned with the things of the mind. And if I am correct in my thesis that there is a necessary connection between crowd-thinking and the various traditional systems of intellectualist, absolutist, and rationalist philosophy, the way out must be through the formation of some such habits of thinking as I have suggested. ”

“ The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character or their [15] intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.... ”

“ Just how far the revolutionary crowds of the past have operated to provide the stereotyped forms in which present crowd-thinking is carried on, it is almost impossible to learn. But that their influence has been great may be seen by anyone who attempts a psychological study of "public opinion." ”

“ Does the crowds thinking commonly show a like tendency to construct an imaginary world of thought-forms and then take refuge in its ideal system? As we saw at the beginning of our discussion, it does. The focusing of general attention upon the abstract and universal is a necessary step in the development of the crowd-mind.
The crowd does not think in order to solve problems. To the crowd-mind, as such, there are no problems. ”

“ Every sort of device will be used to keep the members of the crowd from coming to. In almost every organization and social relationship there will be a tendency on part of the unconscious to behave as crowd. ”

“ In fact, it is just this weakness in our nature which, as we have seen, leads us to become crowd-men in the first place. Furthermore, we have seen that any assertion of personal independence is resented by the crowd because it weakens the crowd-faith of all. ”

“ It has, however, multiplied the number of mutually suspicious crowds, so that no one of them has for long enjoyed a sufficiently great majority to make itself clearly supreme, though it must be admitted that up to the present the business-man crowd has had the best of the deal. ”

“ From the standpoint of psychology, the crowd, as the term is here defined, is not merely a group of people, it is the appearance within such a group of a special mental condition, or crowd-mind. (2) The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction. (3) Conscious personality vanishes. (4) A collective mind is formed: This is Le Bons "Law of the mental unity of crowds." ”

“ The crowd, therefore, since it was regarded as an affair of the emotions, was held to be one among many instances of the natural mental inferiority of the common people, and a proof of their general unfitness for self-government. ”

“ The attention of everyone is first centered on the abstract and universal, as I have indicated. The repressed wish then unconsciously gives to the formulas which the crowd professes a meaning different from that which appears, yet unconsciously associated with it. ”

“ The thing they all most fear is that some one will "start a run on the bank," force it to liquidate, and everyone will lose. So the crowd functions in its way just so long as its members may be cajoled into an appearance of continued confidence in its ideals and values. ”

“ Not every gathering of people shows this crowd-mentality. It is a characteristic which appears under certain circumstances. In this discussion the word "crowd" must be understood to mean the peculiar mental condition which sometimes occurs when people think and act together, either immediately where the members of the group are present and in close contact, or remotely, as when they affect one another in a certain way through the medium of an organization, a party or sect, the press, etc.
The crowd while it is a social phenomenon differs greatly from the social as such. ”

“ How brightly their faces are beaming,
These people who make up the crowd!
How they bow, how they bend, how they flutter,
How they look at each other and smile,
How they glow, and what bon mots they utter! ”

“ I would like to try to express the type of modern man who, as it seems to me, is about to prove himself the real ruler of our modern world, the silent master of what the crowds shall think. It has seemed to me that it is going to be a man of a marked type, and of a particular temperament, to whom we will have to look in our new and crowded world for the crowd-interpreter, or man who touches the imagination of crowds. ”

“ One could only wonder what had happened, sit by helplessly, watch the crowd—thousands of headlong human beings lunging their souls and their bodies through the music, weeping, gasping, huzzaing, and clapping to one another. ”

“ If we wanted to touch the imaginations of crowds, or of any particular crowd, with goodness, the best way to do it would probably be, not to go to the crowd itself, but to the man who is so placed that he determines the crowd's monotony, the daily rhythm with which it lives—the man, if we can find him, who arranges the crowd's heart-beat. ”

“ The violence of the feelings of crowds is also increased, especially in heterogeneous crowds, by the absence of all sense of responsibility. The certainty of impunity, a certainty the stronger as the crowd is more numerous, and the notion of a considerable momentary force due to number, make possible in the case of crowds sentiments and acts impossible for the isolated individual. ”

“ We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization, we want to share the crowd life, to express what people in crowds feel—the great crowd sensations, excitements, the inspirations and depressions of those who live and struggle with crowds. ”

“ He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. ”

“ AFFIRMATION, REPETITION, CONTAGION When it is wanted to stir up a crowd for a short space of time, to induce it to commit an act of any nature—to pillage a palace, or to die in defence of a stronghold or a barricade, for instance—the crowd must be acted upon by rapid suggestion, among which example is the most powerful in its effect. To attain this end, however, it is necessary that the crowd should have been previously prepared by certain circumstances, and, above all, that he who wishes to work upon it should possess the quality to be studied farther on, to which I give the name of prestige. ”

“ A knowledge of the psychology of crowds is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes not to govern them—that is becoming a very difficult matter—but at any rate not to be too much governed by them. ”

“ The fundamental characteristics of the race, which constitute the unvarying source from which all our sentiments spring, always exert an influence on the irritability of crowds, their impulsiveness and their mobility, as on all the popular sentiments we shall have to study. All crowds are doubtless always irritable and impulsive, but with great variations of degree. For instance, the difference between a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon crowd is striking. ”

“ How different from the crowd which one meets in the saloon of fashion, or at a political meeting, or at any other place, where men are accustomed to congregate! Here we are all jostled together, but gently, decorously. ”

“ We have shown that crowds do not reason, that they accept or reject ideas as a whole, that they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and that the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts. We have shown that crowds suitably influenced are ready to sacrifice themselves for the ideal with which they have been inspired. ”

“ The enterprise of touching the imagination of the crowd with goodness, which is being conducted every day on an enormous scale around us, has to be carried on, like all huge enterprises, by men who are in a large degree unconscious of it. ”

“ I have been trying to say in this book that goodness in daily life, or in business, in common world-running or world housekeeping, is by an implacable crowd-process working slowly out of the hands of the wrong men into the hands of the right ones. ”

“ Whether it was a crowd that thought of stealing a penny and did or did not, if the pennies rolling around among their feet made them think, made them experiment, played upon the initiative, the individuality or invention in them, the personal self-control, the social responsibility in them, it was a crowd to be proud of. ”

“ This is not a useless study. Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: it is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them. ”

“ And after all what is really important to a nation is that the people in it—any chance crowd in a street in it should think. I confess I care very little one way or the other about the pennies being saved, or about the brewer's little touch of moral poetry, his idea that this particular crowd was solid Sunday-school from one end to the other, all through. ”