The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
A number of years ago, when the interest in the psychology of the crowd
led me to attempt a study of Mr. Sunday's revival meetings, then in
their earlier stages, certain facts struck me with great force. Whatever
else the revival may be, it provides the student of psychology with a
delightful specimen for analysis. Every element of the mob or crowd-mind
is present and the unconscious manifests itself with an easy naïveté
which is probably found nowhere else, not even in the psychiatric
clinic. One striking fact, which has since provided me with food for a
good deal of reflection, was the place which the revival holds in what I
should like to call the spiritual economy of modern democracy.
It is an interesting historical fact that each great religious revival,
from Savonarola down, has immediately followed--and has been the
resistance of the man in the street to--a period of intellectual
awakening. Mr. Sunday's meetings undeniably provided a device whereby a
certain psychic type, an element which had hitherto received scant
recognition in the community, could enormously enhance his ego
consciousness. It would be manifestly unfair to say that this is the
sole motive of the religious revival, or that only this type of mind is
active in it. But it is interesting to see whose social survival values
stand out most prominently in these religious crowd-phenomena. The
gambler, the drunkard, the loafer, the weak, ignorant, and unsuccessful,
whose self-esteem it may be assumed had always been made to suffer in
small communities, where everyone knew everyone else, had only to yield
himself to the pull of the obviously worked-up mechanism of the
religious crowd, and lo! all was changed. He was now the repentant
sinner, the new convert, over whom there was more rejoicing in heaven,
and, what was more visible, also for a brief time, in the Church, than
over the ninety and nine just persons. He was "redeemed," an object now
of divine love, a fact which anyone who has studied the effects of these
crowd-movements scientifically will agree was at once seized upon by
these converts to make their own moral dilemmas the standards of
righteousness in the community, and hence secure some measure of
dominance.
This self-adulation of crowds, with its accompanying will to be
important, to dominate, is so constant and characteristic a feature of
the crowd-mind that I doubt if any crowd can long survive which fails to
perform this function for its members. Self-flattery is evident in the
pride with which many people wear badges and other insignia of groups
and organizations to which they belong, and in the pompous names by
which fraternal orders are commonly designated. In its more
"exhibitionist" types it appears in parades and in the favorite ways in
which students display their "college spirit." How many school and
college "yells" begin with the formula, "Who are We?" obviously designed
to call general attention to the group and impress upon people its
importance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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