The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
Of the several kinds of crowds, I have selected for our discussion the
mass meeting, because we are primarily interested in the _ideas_ which
dominate the crowd. The same essential psychological elements are also
found in the street crowd or mob. Serious mob outbreaks seldom occur
without mass meetings, oratory, and propaganda. Sometimes, as in the
case of the French Revolution and of the rise of the Soviets in Russia,
the mass meetings are held in streets and public places. Sometimes, as,
for instance, the crowds in Berlin when Germany precipitated the World
War, a long period of deliberate cultivation of such crowd-ideas as
happen to be advantageous to the state precedes. There are instances,
such as the Frank case, which brought unenviable fame to Georgia, when
no mass meeting seems to have been held. It is possible that in this
instance, however, certain newspapers, and also the trial--which, as I
remember, was held in a theater and gave an ambitious prosecuting
attorney opportunity to play the role of mob leader--served the purpose
of the mass meeting.
The series of outbreaks in New York and other cities, shortly after the
War, between the socialists and certain returned soldiers, seem to have
first occurred quite unexpectedly, as do the customary negro lynchings
in the South. In each case I think it will be found that the complex of
crowd-ideas had been previously built up in the unconscious. A
deep-seated antagonism had been unconsciously associated with the
self-appreciative feelings of a number of individuals, all of which
found justification in the consciousness of these persons in the form
of devotion to principle, loyalty, moral enthusiasm, etc. I suspect that
under many of our professed principles there lurk elements of
unconscious sadism and masochism. All that is then required is an
occasion, some casual incident which will so direct the attention of a
number of these persons that they provide one another temporarily with a
congenial social environment. In the South this mob complex is doubtless
formed out of race pride, a certain unconscious eroticism, and will to
power, which unfortunately has too abundant opportunity to justify
itself as moral indignation. With the returned soldiers the unconscious
desires were often rather thinly disguised--primitive impulses to
violence which had been aroused and hardly satisfied by the war, a wish
to exhibit themselves which found its opportunity in the knowledge that
their lawlessness would be applauded in certain influential quarters, a
dislike of the nonconformist, the foreign, and the unknown, which took
the outward form of a not wholly unjustifiable resentment toward the
party which had to all appearances unpatriotically opposed our entrance
into the war.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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