On the other hand, a crowd is more apt to be swayed by the more generous of the coarser emotions, impulses, and sentiments than by those of a meaner universally reprobated kind. For each member of the crowd acts in full publicity; and his knowledge of, and regard for, public opinion will to some extent incline him to suppress the manifestation of feelings which he might indulge in private but would be ashamed of in public. Hence a crowd is more readily carried away by admiration for a noble deed, or by moral indignation against an act of cruelty, than by self-pity or jealousy or envy or a meanly vengeful emotion. At the same time, a crowd is apt to express feelings which imply less consideration and regard for others than the individual, representing the average morality and refinement of its members, would display when not under the influence of the crowd. Thus men, when members of a crowd, will witness with enjoyment scenes of brutality and suffering which, under other circumstances, they would turn away from, or would seek to terminate. To see a man thrown heavily to the ground is not pleasing to most individuals; yet the spectacle provokes roars of delight from the crowd at a football match. How many of the spectators, who, as members of a crowd, hugely enjoy looking on at a prize-fight or a bull-fight, would shrink from witnessing it as isolated individuals! How many boys will join with a crowd of others in cruelly teasing another boy, an animal, an old woman, or a drunken man, who individually are incapable of such ‘thoughtless’ conduct! It may be doubted whether even the depraved population of Imperial Rome could have individually witnessed without aversion the destruction of Christians in the Coliseum. This character of crowds seems to be due to two peculiarities of the collective mental state. In the first place, the individual, in becoming one of a crowd, loses in some degree his self-consciousness, his awareness of himself as a distinct personality, and with it goes also something of his consciousness of his specifically personal relations; he becomes to a certain extent depersonalised. In the second place, and intimately connected with this last change, is a diminution of the sense of personal responsibility: the individual feels himself enveloped and overshadowed and carried away by forces which he is powerless to control; he therefore does not feel called upon to maintain the attitude of self-criticism and self-restraint which under ordinary circumstances are habitual to him, his more refined ideals of behaviour fail to assert themselves against the overwhelming forces that envelope him. THE INTELLECTUAL PROCESSES OF SIMPLE CROWDS