The collective mind: does a crowd become a single psychological being unlike the individuals who compose it?

Gustave Le Bon, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

A gathering of men is not a psychological crowd merely because they stand in one place. But under certain conditions — a shared emotion, an event, a common object of attention — an agglomeration of people acquires new characters very different from those of the individuals composing it.1 The conscious personality of each vanishes; the sentiments and ideas of all take one and the same direction; and there forms, for a time, a single collective mind.

I call this the law of the mental unity of crowds. It matters little that the individuals be alike or unlike, learned or ignorant: from the moment they form a crowd, they are endowed with a sort of collective soul that makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite other than each would feel, think, and act in isolation.2 The man in the crowd is no longer himself; he is a grain of sand amid other grains, which the wind stirs at will.

This collective mind is transient, but while it lasts it is a real being, with its own laws, and it is the proper object of a science of crowds — for it is crowds, and not isolated men, that make and unmake the fortunes of peoples.3

Sources

  1. A thoiiand individuals accidentally gathered in a public place without any determined object in no way consti- tute a crowd from the psychological point of view. To acquire the special characteristics of such a crowd, the influence is necessary of certain pre- disposing causes of which we shall have to deter- mine the nature.
    The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind
  2. He becomes a savage, all a savage's faults and qualities, with momentary violence, enthusiasm, and heroism. the intellectual domain a crowd is always inferior to the isolated unit. In the moral and sentimental domain it may be his superior. A crowd will commit a crime as readily as an act of abnegation.
    The Psychology of Revolution, p. 108
  3. Among the psychological ch aracte ristics of crowds there are some that they may present in common with isolated individuals, and others, on the contrary, which are absolutely peculiar to them and are only to be met with in collectivities. It is i 6 THE MIND OF CROWDS, these special characteristics that we shall study, first of all, in order to show their importance.
    The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind

Where the argument is made

  • The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896 — the law of the mental unity of crowds, Book I)

How the argument was received

The law of the mental unity of crowds founded crowd psychology and remains Le Bon's defining contribution; the intuition that people in groups behave differently than in isolation is permanent. Its strong form — a literal "collective soul" that dissolves individual personality — is heavily contested. Freud accepted Le Bon's description but replaced the mystical group mind with libidinal ties and identification with the leader. Modern social psychology (the social-identity tradition of Reicher and Turner) rejects the "mindless crowd" as empirically false: crowds are shown to act with structure and restraint, expressing a shared social identity rather than losing all identity. So the phenomenon Le Bon named is real and foundational; his account of it as a de-individuating descent into a single soul is the disputed part.