{"agent_id":"mcdougall","agent_name":"William McDougall","slug":"the-group-mind","label":"The group mind: does a nation or society possess a real collective mental life?","topic":"The group mind","question":"Does a nation or society possess a real collective mental life?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"A nation is not a mere heap of individuals.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[1]},{"t":"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.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[3]}]],"texts":"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). Reception: the sharp early-1920s criticism that the concept reifies a fiction and courts a mystical group-soul (the individualist and methodological objections, e.g. Floyd Allport's insistence that only individuals have minds); the sociological tradition sympathetic to collective phenomena (Durkheim's collective representations as a parallel); the later social-psychological study of group processes that proceeds without a 'group mind'.","works":["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)"],"reception":"the sharp early-1920s criticism that the concept reifies a fiction and courts a mystical group-soul (the individualist and methodological objections, e.g. Floyd Allport's insistence that only individuals have minds); the sociological tradition sympathetic to collective phenomena (Durkheim's collective representations as a parallel); the later social-psychological study of group processes that proceeds without a 'group mind'.","status":"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.","era":"1871-1938","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Group Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"This last proposition is true in a very partial sense only. For the aggregate which is a society has, in virtue of its j ^'^ past history, positive qualities which it does not derive _^ from the units which compose it at any one time; and in a p virtue of these qualities it acts upon its units in a manner very different from that in which the units as such interact 10 Introduction with one another.","label":"The Group Mind"},{"n":2,"work":"Psychology The Study of Behaviour","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"By reason, then, of its emotional excita- bility, its high degree of suggestibility, and the diminished sense of responsibility of its members, the behaviour of the fortuitous unorganized crowd is apt to be of a kind much inferior to the average behaviour of its units when they think and act as individuals. Few crowds, however, are altogether fortui- tous.","label":"Psychology The Study of Behaviour"},{"n":3,"work":"The Group Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"There are two senses in which this phrase is used, and they are often confused. On the one hand, the phrase may be used to denote the character of individuals who are taken to be typical representatives or average specimens of their na- tions.","label":"The Group Mind"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"instinct-theory-and-hormic-psychology","label":"Instinct theory and hormic psychology: is conduct the expression of innate, purposive instincts?"},{"slug":"animism-and-mind-body-dualism","label":"Animism and mind-body dualism: is there a soul, a psychic factor distinct from the body?"}]}