Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon is the French author of Psychologie des foules, published in 1895 and known in English as The Crowd. The book popularised the idea now called crowd mentality: that people gathered in numbers think and act as one mind that none of them would own alone. Later research, including a 1998 meta-analysis of 60 studies, tested that idea and found little support for a lost, deindividuated state.

Who they are

Le Bon was a French writer on the psychology of crowds. Michelle Baddeley, retelling his work in Copycats and Contrarians, records that his ideas remained influential. The vault's review of the concept also records that Scipio Sighele's 1891 book on crowds came before his and that Gabriel Tarde's work preceded it as well.

Key papers

  • Le Bon, G. (1895). Psychologie des foules. Paris: Felix Alcan.

The book distinguishes an organised crowd, a collection of people who happen to be in one place, from a psychological crowd, which on Le Bon's account forms an identity of its own that no individual member could explain. Each person in the second kind loses their sense of personal identity.

Key ideas

The central idea is the psychological crowd, the claim that a gathering can take on a collective mind. Baddeley does not endorse the substance, and takes from it a lesson about method: a crowd cannot be assumed to be a simple aggregation of its members.

The experimental descendant of the claim is deindividuation, the proposed loss of self among people in groups. Tom Postmes and Russell Spears pooled 60 independent studies of it in 1998 and found little support for deindividuated antinormative behaviour or for a deindividuated state. The social identity model of deindividuation effects, proposed in 1995 by Stephen Reicher, Spears and Postmes, offers an alternative account through group identity and its norms.

Sources

  1. Le Bon, G. (1895). Psychologie des foules. Paris: Felix Alcan.
  2. Baddeley, M. (2018). Copycats and Contrarians: Why We Follow Others ... and When We Don't. Yale University Press.
  3. Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (1998). Deindividuation and antinormative behavior: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 123(3), 238-259.