Deindividuation

History and Background: Analyses of Crowd Behavior

Theories of crowd behavior provided the origins of modern deindividuation theory. In particular, the work of Gustave Le Bon in 19th-century France resulted in a politically motivated criticism of crowd behavior. At the time, French society was volatile and protests and riots were commonplace (e.g., the revolutionary crowds of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871; see Émile Zola's Germinal and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables for literary accounts of the time). Le Bon's work, which described crowd behavior in general as irrational and fickle, found much support at the time.

Le Bon believed that being in a crowd allows individuals to act differently than they would act when alone. Being submerged in a large group of people allows an individual to react on impulses that would normally be controlled and perform behaviors that would normally be self-censored. Some of these behaviors, in the words of Le Bon, can be “primitive, base and ghastly.” Le Bon argued that such undesirable behaviors can arise due to three mechanisms. First, anonymity prevents people from being isolated or identified from others in a crowd. Being undifferentiated from others leads to a loss of personal responsibility, a sense of being “untouchable,” and a loss of self-control. People are therefore free to express the darker sides of themselves that they would normally keep hidden. Le Bon further argued that this loss of control leads to contagion, where a lack of responsibility spreads throughout the crowd and everyone begins to think and act in the same manner. Finally, people in the crowd become more suggestible. In other words, being in a crowd leads to a blind acceptance of the demands of being in a crowd, and people unquestioningly follow the impulses that emanate from a common unconscious. Le Bon's analysis suggests that crowds are messy, incoherent, and often dangerous rabbles where people are not capable of self-control. Personal identity is lost, and people behave as if they were all in possession of the same, inferior mind.

Le Bon's work was very influential. For example, in the 1920s Sigmund Freud argued along similar lines that crowds unlock people's unconscious [Page 199]impulses. Individuals’ basic impulses (derived from the id) are controlled by crowd leaders who, via a process similar to hypnosis, bring out the animalistic tendencies within all people involved. Similarly, in the 1920s William McDougall argued that crowds bring out people's instinctive primary emotions, such as anger and fear. Because everyone experiences these basic emotions and people are less likely to have more complex emotions in common, the basic emotions will spread rapidly within a crowd as people express them. It was argued that this process, similar to Le Bon's idea of contagion, leads to deregulated and impulsive behavior, against normal personal standards.

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