The group mind: does a nation or society possess a real collective mental life?

William McDougall, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

A nation is not a mere heap of individuals. When men are organized into an enduring society — with a continuity of tradition, a system of relations, a self-consciousness of the whole, and institutions that carry its purposes across generations — there arises a collective mental life with properties that no individual member possesses and that the mere sum of individuals does not display.

I do not mean a mystical over-soul floating above its members; I mean that the organized group thinks, feels, and acts as a system, that its mind is real in the same sense that any organization of interacting parts is real, and that it is the proper object of a genuine group psychology. The crowd is the lowest and least organized form of collective life, and it shows the phenomenon in its crude state — the individual's intelligence lowered, his emotion heightened, his suggestibility raised, as he is absorbed into the whole.

The organized nation is the highest form, and in it the group mind can rise above rather than sink below the level of its members.¹ To deny the reality of collective mental life because only individuals have brains is to mistake the seat of mind for the whole of it.²

Sources

1. Maciver argues further: "Social organisations occur of every kind and every degree of universality. If England has a collective mind, why not Birmingham and why not each of its wards? If a nation has a collective mind, so also have a church and a trade union.

   The Group Mind

2. The mind of any nation occupies some intermediate position in the scale of which these are the extreme types; and it differs from both in being immensely more complex, and also in that the influence of the past dominates and determines to a much greater extent the mental life of the present.

   The Group Mind

Where the argument is made

• The Group Mind (1920, the central treatise on the mental life of organized groups, the national mind and character, and the conditions of collective mental life)
• An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908, the instinctive basis of the crowd and of collective behavior)

How the argument was received

One of McDougall's most criticized doctrines and a founding controversy of social psychology. The individualist and methodological objection — pressed hardest by Floyd Allport, who insisted that only individuals have minds and that a "group mind" is a reification that courts mysticism — largely carried the Anglo-American field, and social psychology developed as the study of the individual in the social situation rather than of a collective mind. On the Continent the concept had kin in Durkheim's collective representations and the tradition of a social reality irreducible to individuals. Later work on group dynamics, norms, and collective behavior studies the phenomena McDougall pointed to without adopting his ontology. The question of whether collective mental phenomena are real in more than a metaphorical sense remains genuinely open across psychology and social theory.