Crowd Behaviour

Question 1

Le Bon’s (1897) view of crowds

Answer 1

Appalled by “primitive, base, and ghastly” crowd behaviour. Suggested that in crowds, civilised behaviour is replaced by animal instincts. Crowds are pathological

Question 2

Le Bon’s reasons for ‘crowd mind’

Answer 2

1. Anonymity - lose personal responsibility for actions
2. Contagion - rapid spread of ideas and feelings
3. Suggestibility - unconscious antisocial motives released through suggestion

Question 3

Who took up Le Bon’s idea that crowds release unconscious feelings?

Answer 3

Freud

Question 4

What did Freud suggest about crowds?

Answer 4

Suggested that crowds ‘unlock’ the primitive and violent urges stored in the unconscious (id).

Question 5

Who supplants the super-ego?

Answer 5

The crowd leader

Question 6

Who is the ‘primal father’?

Answer 6

The crowd leader

Question 7

Collective behaviour

Answer 7

When groups increase in size, new features of behaviour may be seen

Question 8

How did early theories characterise crowds?

Answer 8

Psychologically pathological, dangerous to society, and as undermining individual nationality and morality

Question 9

What is the social identity approach to crowds?

Answer 9

Crowds are actually intergroup phenomenons (e.g., rioters vs. police). Crowd behaviour is a socially meaningful response to a wider social context

Question 10

Emergent norms theory (Turner, 1974; Turner & Killian, 1957)

Answer 10

Collective behaviour is not pathological or “out of control”. Because crowds are new and unfamiliar groupings, there are no pre-existing norms for how to behave

Question 11

Deindividuation

Answer 11

In large crowds, we lose our individual identity