The Psychology of crowds

The Psychology of crowds

Sociological and psychological studies on crowd behavior still refer to two fundamental articles written twenty-six years apart: Gustave Le Bon’s  “The Crowd” and Sigmund Freud’s “Group psychology and the analysis of the Ego”. The reason why these works have remained the compulsory reference points for research into crowd dynamics for so long undoubtedly lies in the accuracy of the description of their phenomenology. In addition to this in the Freudian essay there is the analysis of the ties uniting individuals in a crowd with their leaders.  However, while the two essays are still insuperable in terms of “how” a crowd behaves, the same cannot be said for “why”, since this is based on a predisposition (the drive theory in Freudian metapsychology) challenged by contemporary scientific research. This predisposition has actually changed from being a trait of the scientific culture of the time to a pessimistic institution of meaning that has pervaded and continues to pervade the individual and collective representation of the nature of human beings.

The psychology of crowds according to Le Bon

The first aspect that Le Bon clarifies and that will have repercussions on the psychology of groups is the difference between crowd and psychological crowd.  A number of people gathered in a square by chance with no aim constitute a crowd but not a psychological crowd. To become such, there must be several events that will lead the people to be initially a crowd being organised and then an organised psychological crowd, focusing on one aim. The process of forming a psychological crowd begins with a gradual thinning16of the individual conscience and at the same time the orientation of each person’s feelings and thoughts towards a common goal17. Physical nearness is not indispensable for the creation of a psychological mass, it is the emotions that count in their orientation towards a single goal. The result of this is that even thousands of separate individuals, under the influence of violent emotions in a single direction, can take on the characteristics of a psychological mass. It has happened in certain historical periods, argues Le Bon, that an entire people has become a crowd under this influence or that, without there being any visible nearness. This may therefore also apply to the “media masses”. It can be argued, in fact, that thousands of individuals in front of their television sets, gripped by violent emotions aroused by the images on the screen, make up a psychological crowd. Radio, television and the internet are all tools of contemporary living which can cause  thousands or millions of people to unite in a short time.

The shared goal is the necessary condition determining the creation of a psychic network among individuals. In this respect the psychological crowd is undoubtedly a network, whether it is mediatic or not, made up of many people united by a single aim. It is a psychic network characterised by fragile links that produces its own phenomenology marked by extreme, radical emotions.

The traits of the individuals18 making up a crowd have no effect in terms of its constitution because the mere fact of being transformed into a crowd, of being crucial links in this specific network, makes them part of a collective spirit19which, writes Le Bon, “makes them feel, think and act in a completely different way from how they would operate singly” (Le Bon, 1895, Ital. ed., 2004, p. 49)20. In the collective spirit, men’s intellectual aptitudes and therefore also their individuality are annulled, the heterogeneous vanishes into the homogeneous, the unconscious dominates the conscious, the irrational prevails over the rational, stupidity over intelligence. For this reason crowds are not able to perform acts “that require higher intelligence” (Le Bon, 1895, Ital. ed., 2004, p. 52). They accumulate not the intelligence but the mediocrity of the world and therefore “It is not the whole world together (…) that has more spirit than Voltaire. Voltaire certainly has more spirit than the world, if «the whole world» represents the crowd” (Le Bon, 1895, Ital. ed., 2004, p. 52). This kind of network, of crowd, has an original character that does not come from the sum-total or from the average of the participants’ characters, but from the combination and creation of new characters, as happens in chemical phenomena.

Why does the individual behave in one way when he is isolated and in a different way when he is in a crowd? To answer this question, Le Bon uses the concept of the unconscious, whose characteristics are quite similar to those suggested by Freud. For Le Bon, the unconscious is a container of the spirit of the race, representing its most ancient, instinctive part. Every human being conveys the spirit of the race, which sits quietly hidden in the unconscious, until it bursts out in the crowd, simultaneously with that of the others. All human beings are similar in the unconscious elements making up their psyche, while they differ in the conscious elements, which are subjected to the influence of education. This leads Le Bon to say that: “Between a famous mathematician and his bootmaker there may be an abyss in terms of intellectual relationship, but from the point of view of character and beliefs, the difference is often non-existent or very slight” (Le Bon, 1895, Ital. ed., 2004, p. 51).

In a crowd it is possible to identify three basic psychological traits. The first is a feeling of invincible power deriving from the number: the bigger the crowd, the more invincible its individual members feel. This leads individuals to give in to instincts21that in isolation they would be able to restrain. The fact that the bigger the crowd, the greater the sense of anonymity, makes both the crowd and the individuals irresponsible.

The second psychological trait of the crowd, and the network, is mental contagion. The individuals in the crowd are vulnerable; every feeling, every act is so contagious that “the individual sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest” (Le Bon, 1895, Ital. ed., 2004, p. 53).

Lastly, the third trait is suggestibility. Every individual immersed in a crowd is easily influenced and this suggestibility is contagious. “The individual, finding himself plunged into a crowd in ferment, falls (…) into a special state, very similar to the state of thrall of the hypnotised subject in the hands of his hypnotiser” (Le Bon, 1895, Ital. ed., 2004, p. 53). The conscious personality vanishes, willpower and discernment disappear. In this situation, the feelings and thoughts of the individual in a crowd are easily steered in the direction desired by the hypnotiser. In conclusion, crowds are easy to manipulate.

Freud’s crowd psychology

Freud’s essay, “Group psychology and the analysis of the Ego”, published in 1921, can be divided into two parts plus an introduction that I will discuss last.

The first part is a repetition of “The Crowd” by Le Bon, with whom Freud shares some assumptions, specifically the idea that the individual in a mass tends to act in a different way from usual. Freud adopts the individual/mass juxtaposition, which he sees as corresponding to the polarities of waking/dream states, consciousness/unconscious, reason/drive.

In the second part of the essay, Freud analyses the affective ties that keep individuals united in a mass. To do this, he uses the example of the church and the army, “two highly organised, lasting, artificial masses” (Freud, 1921, p. 283). He brings out the libidinal nature of the ties between the individual members, distinguishing the ties between peers from those of each person with the leader. In the mass, he writes, “the individuals behave as if they were homogeneous, tolerating the others’ peculiar way of being, considering themselves the same as the other people and not feeling any feelings of aversion towards them. Based on our theoretical conceptions, such a limitation of narcissism can be produced by only one factor: the libidinal tie with other people. Self love finds a limit only in external love, in love directed at objects” (Freud, 1921, p. 291). Each person’s tie with the leader is linked by Freud to identification, which is “the first manifestation of an emotive tie with another person" (Freud, 1921, p. 293). The individual in the mass tends to configure his own Ego “as the Ego of a person taken as a model” (Freud, 1921, p. 303), which means that the Ego is also composed of a part called the “ideal of the Ego”. A mass is therefore made up of “a certain number of individuals that have put a single object in the place of their ideal of the Ego and that have therefore identified with each other’s Ego” (Freud, 1921, p. 304).

In view of what Freud states, a closer examination can be made of the description of the crowd as a psychic network generated by the shared goal, in the following way: the network is made up of nodes and threads, the first being individuals, and the second the affective ties that keep them united with each other. These derive from the identification with each other after they have recognised their shared object of love, the leader, in the other person.

In Freud’s essay, if we read closely, there is an element of confusion that, for the purposes of our article, needs to be shown to be dealing with the dynamics underlying formation of xenophobic masses. Freud, in fact, at a certain point changes the object of study, transforming what is not the mass into the mass. The church and the army are actually not masses but organisations and the justification for this statement will now be discussed.

Analysing the church, the army and the mass along a temporal axis, a substantial difference is quickly seen: the first two are enduring, the second is momentary, being organised and disorganised in a short time. Looking at how they start, the church and the army may once have been masses, but later they were established, creating solid hierarchies, to which the members refer. The crowd, on the other hand, has no hierarchies and both the ties that form between the participants, and those with the leaders, are intense but also short-lived, unlike those that form in the army and in the church that are presumed to be more solid and enduring. Above all, unlike the mass, the church and the army have generated a history and therefore also rites and traditions to celebrate it.

The mass, like the church and the army, is formed in favor of22or against something, but with some basic differences. With the mass, there is no rational motivation underlying its establishment and its operation, and if there is a motivation it is emotional, while in the second two there is23. In the army, for example, one is rationally trained to oppose someone, while in a crowd there is no training, certainly not any rational training. Its movement in one direction or another is spontaneous and immediate due to the feeling of invincibility that characterises it.

The degree to which the crowd’s conscience is reduced, as in the case of the burning of the Romany camps,  or in a stadium crowd, cannot in any way be compared to that of the church congregation or of the army in battle. Suggestibility and emotive contagion are experiences that can occur in organisations but that do not underlie their existence, unlike what happens in crowds.

Essentially, a  crowd is a very different thing from an organisation, since it is formed with no other purpose than to “commit a crime, worship an idol or, in the case of positive acts, raise mountains” (Enriquez,1986, p. 81). Consequently, the Freud-Le Bon description of the crowd is only valid when applied to mass movements, the great “collective demonstrations of the ‘secular mass’ kind, which aim to honor idols or to let it be understood that they could be destroyed by the word alone (in other words, those where words reign and can therefore exert their power, or those that aim at immediate, unreflective action, which is more or less violent: assaults, lynchings, mass marches)” (Enriquez,1986, p. 81). In the other cases where words have been subjected to reflection, where reason dominates emotion, we find ourselves before an organisation, in which the phenomenology of the crowd is replaced by one of its own with clearly defined characteristics.

In some moments of human history, and the one we are going through may become one of these, the institutions of hatred24will try to provoke phenomena “designed to transform society, which is usually structured in classes, categories or social groups, in an anonymous crowd, a “lonely crowd”, into a real «mass», considered easier to manipulate by established groups” (Enriquez, 1986, p. 81).

The introduction to Freud’s essay, which I have deliberately left to the end to analyse, is as Enriquez says, perhaps with a slight exaggeration, a bomb, because it “poses  the question of the contrast between individual psychology and social psychology” (Enriquez, 1986, p. 67)25. Freud actually writes, “The contrast between individual psychology and social or mass psychology, a contrast that at first may seem to us to be very important, when examined more closely loses most of its rigidity. Individual psychology focuses on the single man and aims to discover how he pursues the satisfaction of his drives: and yet it is only rarely in exceptional circumstances that individual psychology manages to disregard the relations of this individual with other individuals. In the individual’s psychic life, the other person is regularly present as a model, as an object, as a rescuer, as an enemy, and therefore in this wider, but undoubtedly legitimate sense, right from the start, individual psychology is at the same time social psychology” (Freud, 1921, p. 261).

In actual fact, the beginning of the text lets us envisage the decisive presence of the social dimension, namely of relating, in individual psychic life, thus foreshadowing the relational paradigm at the center of today’s psychodynamic research. The initial statements, in particular, have some consequences: that the mind’s organisation depends on the environment and is related to the history of its identifications; that individual behavior is a function of the environment, with the result that a change in the environment involves a change in individual behavior; that behaviors, including pathological26 ones, are individuals’ response to the environment they live in. As we can see, this is a diametrically opposed vision to that of individual drives. This environment and the relation with it are placed on the edges of the establishment of psychic life,   so both individual and collective psychic events are due to the hereditary drives that characterise the human species as an animal species.  In sharp contrast with the thinking of the time, Freud in “Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego” abandoned the dispositional perspective (psychic life starts from drives) and embraced the situational perspective(psychic life starts from relating) 27.

With “Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego” Freud certainly went beyond the nature/nurture, innate/acquired contrast, and in a period marked by reductionism, introduced elements of complexity to the study of the human mind. Unfortunately he did not follow up the consequences of this insight28. His metapsychology would continue to rotate around the individualistic drive paradigm and the original insights present at the outset of the essay were to remain long forgotten before being taken up by others and examined more deeply.

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