What is crowd mentality?
Crowd mentality is the popular idea that people in a crowd lose their own judgement and act as one mind. A 60-study meta-analysis and two field experiments tested it.
Answer to the question
What is crowd mentality?
Crowd mentality is the popular idea that people in a crowd lose their individual judgement and act as one mind. Gustave Le Bon spread it in 1895. A 1998 meta-analysis of 60 studies found little support for a lost, deindividuated state and found behaviour following the norms of the situation.
Key takeaways
- Le Bon (1895) described a psychological crowd as having an identity of its own; Baddeley reports the theory carefully and keeps one lesson: a crowd is not a simple sum of its members.
- Postmes and Spears (1998) pooled 60 independent studies and found little support for a deindividuated state or for deindividuated antinormative behaviour.
- In that meta-analysis, groups and individuals conformed more to situation-specific norms when they were deindividuated.
- Reicher, Spears and Postmes (1995) proposed the social identity model of deindividuation effects, which explains crowd behaviour through group identity and its norms.
- Gallup and colleagues (2012) tracked 3,325 pedestrians: gaze copying rose with group size, levelled off, and was too weak to create a tipping point.
Most people use crowd mentality as if it were settled fact: put enough people together and they stop thinking for themselves. The phrase comes from an 1890s theory that research has spent a century testing, and the tests turned out more interesting than the theory.
A Nineteenth-Century Idea That Is Still in Everyday Use
Le Bon published Psychologie des foules in 1895, and Michelle Baddeley retells its history in Copycats and Contrarians, in her chapter on mob psychology. Le Bon separated two kinds of gathering, as Baddeley explains.
- An organised crowd is a collection of people who happen to be in one place, and it can be large without being dangerous.
- A psychological crowd, on his account, forms an identity of its own that no single member could explain, and each person in it loses their sense of personal identity.
The second kind is what most people picture when they hear crowd mentality used of a stadium, a sale or a street.
Baddeley reports the theory with care. She notes that his ideas were largely derivative, that they stayed influential for decades, and that his speculations about brain size are not supported by modern neuroscience. The lesson she keeps is not a verdict on the theory but one of method: a crowd cannot be assumed to be a simple sum of the people in it.
That lesson explains why the label lasted. The idea of a crowd mentality points at something real, which is that being among many people changes what an individual does. It also assumes an answer to what the change consists of, and the later research tested that assumption directly.
What Sixty Studies Found and What Followed Them
Deindividuation was the research name for the loss of self that Le Bon described. Studies of it typically varied anonymity, self-awareness and group size, as routes into the state. A 1998 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 60 independent studies, and its authors were Tom Postmes and Russell Spears.
Anonymity and group size were among the features the pooled studies had varied, since those are the ones usually linked to crowd mentality. The authors reported little support for the idea that anonymous people act against norms, and little support for a deindividuated state existing at all. What the studies did show was that groups and individuals followed the norms of their specific situation more closely when they were deindividuated, and the authors judged that result inconsistent with deindividuation theory and in line with a social identity model.
The behaviour behind any crowd mentality can therefore be unusual without being free of rules. People tracked the rules of the setting they were in, and tracked them more closely, not less.
The social identity model of deindividuation effects was set out in 1995 by Stephen Reicher, Spears and Postmes, in a chapter in European Review of Social Psychology. The name carries the proposal. The model asks what crowd mentality looks like once the group is taken seriously. Effects that deindividuation theory attributed to a lost self are explained through social identity, meaning the group a person is acting as a member of and the norms that go with it.
The same logic runs through the wider work on belonging. What is group identification? follows how researchers measure the sense that a group is part of who a person is, and Why Do We Need to Belong? sets out the need that makes such groups matter. A crowd, in this account, is a group like any other, and what it does depends on what its members share.
Crowd mentality as a phrase hides that dependence, because it treats the crowd as the unit of explanation and leaves the members and their shared norms out of view. It describes one mind, where the research describes many people acting on the same local norms. On that account two crowds with different shared identities should behave differently, which a single crowd mentality cannot easily accommodate.
Does Copying Spread Between Strangers Like a Contagion?
A New York street gave the design that most experiments on crowds still borrow. In 1969 Stanley Milgram and two colleagues had confederates stop on a busy pavement and look up at a window. The larger the group looking, the larger the share of passers-by who stopped and looked too. That finding is the base of the drawing power of crowds, and Does a Long Queue Make People Want In covers it in full.
Real crowds of 3,325 pedestrians were tracked in the 2012 repeat, led by Andrew Gallup. Copying of the upward gaze rose as the group of confederates grew, then levelled off for larger groups. The authors built a model from the results and concluded that gaze following spreads attention from person to person but is too weak to produce a tipping point. A second experiment, with two confederates behaving suspiciously, supported the model. A strong crowd mentality would predict a rapid cascade once enough people joined, and the measured curve flattened instead.
Strength of response depended on the physical setting, the social context and the sex of the passer-by. Most of the visual interaction happened within about two metres, so at the scale where copying occurred, the crowd that mattered was the handful of people standing nearby.
Common questions
What is crowd mentality?
Crowd mentality is the popular idea that people in a crowd lose their individual judgement and act as one mind. Gustave Le Bon's 1895 study of crowds spread it, and later research has tested it.
Is crowd mentality real?
The label points at a real effect, since people behave differently among others. A 1998 meta-analysis of 60 studies found little support for a lost, deindividuated state, and found behaviour following the norms of the situation.
What replaced the idea of a crowd mind?
The social identity model of deindividuation effects, set out in 1995, explains crowd behaviour through the group people act as members of and its norms. The 1998 meta-analysis fitted that model better than deindividuation theory.
Sources
Baddeley, M. (2018). Copycats and Contrarians: Why We Follow Others ... and When We Don't. Seed book; vault hub Books/Copycats and Contrarians.
Le Bon, G. (1895). Psychologie des foules. Paris: Felix Alcan.
Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (1998). “Deindividuation and antinormative behavior: A meta-analysis.” Psychological Bulletin, 123(3), 238-259. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.123.3.238 https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.123.3.238
Reicher, S. D., Spears, R., & Postmes, T. (1995). “A social identity model of deindividuation phenomena.” European Review of Social Psychology, 6, 161-198. doi:10.1080/14792779443000049 https://doi.org/10.1080/14792779443000049
Milgram, S., Bickman, L., & Berkowitz, L. (1969). 'Note on the drawing power of crowds of different size.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13(2), 79-82. doi:10.1037/h0028070 https://doi.org/10.1037/h0028070
Gallup, A. C., Hale, J. J., Sumpter, D. J. T., Garnier, S., Kacelnik, A., Krebs, J. R., & Couzin, I. D. (2012). 'Visual attention and the acquisition of information in human crowds.' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(19), 7245-7250. doi:10.1073/pnas.1116141109 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1116141109