Crowds

People have been taught to fear the masses as destructive forces

Crowd psychology emerged from concerns about the formation of a mass society in the era of industrialisation (Giner, 1976) and about the preservation of social order. At the root of such concerns lies a belief that in the absence of clear hierarchies to guide them, people are unable to think for themselves. This model holds that, given the psychological fragility of people and the futility of trying to reason with them, there is a need to shepherd them (see also Chapters 1 and 5).

If the masses were an imminent threat, the ‘crowd’ represented the moment at which they would rise up to batter down the social order. Hence the crowd has become a dense symbol of all that the elites feared in the mass: in the crowd, [Page 76]people were thought to be quintessentially destructive (Barrows, 1981). All these ideas were central in the writings of the early crowd psychologists: predominantly gentlemen scholars, particularly from France, which, in the Paris Commune of 1871, had witnessed the uprising and temporary victory of the masses. They had seen the crowd in action. They were terrified and haunted by it.

The most famous of those scholars was Gustave Le Bon. In his 1895 book The Crowd, Le Bon argues that the self is lost as one becomes submerged in the crowd. Loss of self means loss of standards, and so one has no means of evaluating and resisting the ideas and emotions to which one is exposed. These ideas therefore become ‘contagious’, spreading without check. Where do these ideas come from? Le Bon saw them as emerging from an atavistic collective unconscious which is exposed once the rational individual self has been stripped away. As a consequence, Le Bon asserted, crowd members are barbarians: fickle, emotional, unable to reason, sometimes heroic, but always destructive. It is not a pretty portrait. But it is an influential portrait, which continues to colour both popular views and the practices of agencies such as the police and emergency services (Drury, Novelli, & Stott, 2013), including those who report on and deal with mass behaviour in the COVID-19 crisis.

Crowd behaviour is shaped by shared notions of morality

Le Bon’s portrait may be influential, but it is far from accurate. This is hardly surprising. He and his contemporaries viewed the crowd as horrified outsiders. Early crowd ‘science’ was a discipline rooted in fantasy and fear more than evidence (McPhail, 2017; Reicher, 2001). On closer and more systematic inspection a very different image emerges. Crowd events are not random explosions of rage. Indeed, violence and conflict are very much the exception rather than the rule (Barrows, 1981). But even in the most violent of crowds, behaviour remains orderly and patterned, and these patterns are socially meaningful (Davis, 1973).

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