The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology: With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character — John Shaqi
The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology: With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and CharacterMcDougall, William
Science
The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology: With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character
McDougall, William
Ethnopsychology; National characteristics; Social psychology
But the low sense of responsibility of the crowd is not due to the
division of responsibility alone. In the case of the simple crowd, it is
due also in large part to the fact that such a crowd has but a very low
grade of self-consciousness and no self-regarding sentiment; that is to
say, the members of the crowd have but a dim consciousness of the crowd
as a whole, but very little knowledge of its tendencies and capacities,
and no sentiment of love, respect, or regard of any kind for it and its
reputation in the eyes of men. Hence, since the responsibility falls on
the whole crowd, and any loss or gain of reputation affects the crowd
and hardly at all the individuals who are merged in it, they are not
stimulated to exert care and self-restraint and critical deliberation in
forming their judgments, in arriving at decisions, or in executing any
task collectively undertaken. The results of these two conditions of
collective mental life are well summed up in the popular dictum that a
corporation has no conscience.
Since all these factors co-operate to keep the intellectual activity of
the simple crowd on a low level, it follows that very simple
intellectual processes must be relied on by the orator who would sway a
crowd; he must rely on abuse and ridicule of opponents, or unmeasured
praise of friends; on flattery; on the _argumentum ad hominem_; on
induction by simple enumeration of a few striking instances; on obvious
and superficial analogies; on the evocation of vivid representative
imagery rather than of abstract ideas; and, above all, on confident
assertion and reiteration, and on a display of the coarser emotions.
Since the individuals comprised in a crowd are apt to be influenced in
all these ways by the mass of their fellows, it follows that the mental
processes, the thoughts and feelings and actions, of each one will be as
a rule very different from what they would be if he faced a similar
situation as an isolated individual; the mental processes of each one
are profoundly modified by his mental interactions with all the other
members of the crowd. Therefore the collective actions of a crowd are
not simply the resultants of all the tendencies to thought and action of
the individuals, as such, but may be very different from any such
resultant. And they are not merely the expression of the individual
tendencies of the average member, nor yet of the mass of least
intelligent and refined members; they may be, and often are, such as no
one of the members acting alone would ever display or attempt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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