--Gustave Le Bon
I have long been interested in the subject of crowds and mass movements, perhaps stirred in part by having come of age during the antiwar Vietnam protest era. In my second semester I took a sociology class related to this theme (mass movements, not Viet Nam).
Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895; often subtitled The Psychology of Revolution in later editions) is a seminal work in social psychology. Le Bon argues that individuals in crowds lose rationality, descending into a collective mind driven by emotion, suggestion, and impulsivity. I witnessed this first-hand on two occasions while in college, the first during the Mayday protests in Washington D.C., 1971. The second was at Ohio University.
I remember a hilarious Dave Berg cartoon in Mad Magazine in which four self-conscious teen-aged boys of the "Aw shucks" variety are hanging out. Once together they are suddenly hoisting a battering ram to break into a house where there's a party of girls. Berg's amusing cartoon illustrates how we often change when part of a group.
What is a crowd? Gustave Le Bon described it as a group of people brought together by a shared idea or belief. But this shared belief isn’t necessarily formed through careful thinking or by weighing evidence. Instead, crowds tend to accept ideas quickly and emotionally, often using them as motivation for action—sometimes even radical action.
According to Le Bon, when a person becomes part of a crowd, something changes inside them. They no longer think or act the same way they would on their own. In a real sense, they stop functioning as an independent individual and begin to take on the mindset of the group.
Crowds can become barbaric, credulous, and led by simplistic ideas, images, and prestige rather than logic, Le Bon correctly observes. He classifies crowds as heterogeneous or homogeneous, explores leaders' manipulative role via affirmation, repetition, and contagion, and applies this to revolutions (e.g., French Revolution), warning of democracy's risks from mass irrationality. His writings influenced both Freud, and Hitler, as well as modern crowd control.
Le Bon argues that "when societies decay, it is always the masses that bring about their downfall. This is a controversial but thought-provoking idea, especially in today’s era of viral outrage and mass protests."*
Critique
Le Bon's insights on suggestibility and deindividuation prefigure modern psychology (e.g., Leary's deindividuation theory) and remain relevant in analyzing mobs, social media echo chambers, or populist movements. Deindividuation explains how people in groups or anonymous situations can lose their sense of individual identity and self-awareness, leading to reduced inhibitions, less accountability, and behavior that deviates from personal or social norms—sometimes impulsive, aggressive, or antisocial. LeBon's emphasis on emotional contagion explains rapid idea spread.
Critics, however, say the work is pseudoscientific: anecdotal, elitist, and racist (portraying "inferior races" as crowd-prone). They also say it overgeneralizes, ignoring rational crowds (e.g., protests achieving reform) or positive collective action. Deterministic and anti-democratic, it influenced authoritarian propaganda. Empirically weak by today's standards—no data, experiments—but historically pivotal for understanding group dynamics' dark side. Having witnessed the manner in which crowds can seduce people into abandoning common sense, I would suggest that LeBon was to some degree on target with his own early observations.
