Concept
crowd psychology
The idea that people who come together acquire new characteristics and become open to suggestion and contagion; made famous by Le Bon (1895), later criticised by social-identity approaches.
Crowd psychology says that people who come together acquire characteristics they do not have one by one. Le Bon (1895) names three causes: a feeling of invincible power together with anonymity, contagion and, most important, suggestibility. The result is that the person descends several rungs on the ladder of civilisation. In his account this is added to the inherited traits tied to a people’s “race”.
Crowd psychology arose at the end of the nineteenth century first among judges and writers who dealt with crime and criminality; Reicher argues that it was an “establishment response”. The same author writes that in the Bristol 1980 data crowd behaviour was targeted and limited, and that this is explained by a shared social identity; on this view the limit of contagion is the limit of shared identity.
Today the term does two different jobs: a historical current, Le Bon’s theory of the crowd, and the effort in social psychology to explain crowd behaviour; the two should not be confused.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) If at a rally a proposal that nobody alone would approve is accepted without objection, Le Bon would explain it by suggestion and contagion; Reicher would look at shared identity.