MANY people are ready to accept the truth that association is the law of life. But in consequence of an acceptance of this theory with only a partial understanding of it, many people to-day are advocating the life of the crowd. The words society, crowd, and group are often used interchangeably for a number of people together. One writer says, “The real things are breathed forth from multitudes ... the real forces of to-day are group forces.” Or we read of “the gregarious or group life,” or “man is social because he is suggestible,” or, “man is social because he likes to be with a crowd.” But we do not find group forces in multitudes: the crowd and the group represent entirely different modes of association. Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than of thought, or if on the latter, then on a concurrence produced by becoming aware of similarities, not by a slow and gradual creating of unity. It is a crowd emotion if we all shout “God save the King.” Suggestibility, feeling, impulse—this is usually the order in the crowd mind.
I know a little boy of five who came home from school one day and said with much impressiveness, “Do you know whose birthday it is to-morrow?” “No,” said his mother, “whose?” “Ab’m Lincoln’s,” was the reply. “Who is he?” said the mother. With a grave face and an awed voice the child replied, “He freed the slates!” and then added, “I don’t know whether they were the big kind like mine or the little kind like Nancy’s.” But his emotion was apparently as great, his sentiment as sincere, as if he had understood what Lincoln had done for his country. This is a good example of crowd suggestion because thought was in this case inhibited by contagious emotion.
Suggestion is the law of the crowd, interpenetration of the group. When we study a crowd we see how quickly B takes A’s ideas and also C and D and E; when we study a group we see that the ideas of A often arouse in B exactly opposite ones. Moreover, the crowd often deadens thought because it wants immediate action, which means an unthinking unanimity not a genuine collective thought.[[29]] The group on the other hand stimulates thought. There are no “differences” in the crowd mind. Each person is swept away and does not stop to find out his own difference. In crowds we have unison, in groups harmony. We want the single voice but not the single note; that is the secret of the group. The enthusiasm and unanimity of a mass-meeting may warm an inexperienced heart, but the experienced know that this unanimity is largely superficial and is based on the spread of similar ideas, not the unifying of differences. A crowd does not distinguish between fervor and wisdom; a group usually does. We do not try to be eloquent when we appear before a board or a commission; we try merely to be convincing. Before a group it is self-control, restraint, discipline which we need, we don’t “let ourselves go”; before a crowd I am sorry to say we usually do. Many of us nowadays resent being used as part of a crowd; the moment we hear eloquence we are on the defensive. The essential evil of crowds is that they do not allow choice, and choice is necessary for progress. A crowd is an undifferentiated mass; a group is an articulated whole.
It is often difficult to determine whether a number of people met together are a crowd or a group (that is, a true society), yet it is a distinction necessary for us to make if we would understand their action. It is not in the least a question of numbers: it is obvious that according to our present definition a group is not a small number of people and a crowd a large number. If someone cries “Fire,” and you and I run to the window, then you and I are a crowd. The difference between a group and a crowd is not one of degree but of kind. I have seen it stated in a sociological treatise that in any deliberative assembly there is a tendency for the wisest thought to prevail. This assumes that “any deliberative assembly” is more like a group than a crowd—a very pleasant thing to assume!
Some writers seem to think that the difference between a crowd and a not-crowd is the difference between organized and unorganized, and the example is given of laborers unorganized as a crowd and of a trade-union as a not-crowd. But a trade-union can be and often is a crowd.
We have distinguished between the crowd and the group; it is also necessary to distinguish between the crowd and the mob. Often the crowd or mass is confused with the mob. The examples given of the mass or crowd mind are usually a lynching-party, the panic-stricken audience in a theatre fire, the mobs of the French Revolution. But all these are very different from a mass of people merely acting under the same suggestion, so different that we need different names for them. We might for the moment call one a crowd and the other a mob.
An unfortunate stigma has often attached itself to the crowd mind because of this tendency to think of the crowd mind as always exhibiting itself in inferior ways. Mass enthusiasm, it is true, may lead to riots, but also it may lead to heroic deeds. People talk much of the panic of a crowd, but every soldier knows that men are brave, too, in a mass. Students have often studied what they called the mass mind when it was under the stress of great nervous strain and at a high pitch of excitement, and then have said the mass acts thus and so. It has been thought legitimate to draw conclusions concerning the nature of the mass mind from an hysterical mob. It has been assumed that a crowd was necessarily, as a crowd, in a condition of hysteria. It has often been taken for granted that a crowd is a pathological condition. And color has been given to this theory by the fact that we owe much of our knowledge of the laws of suggestion to pathologists.
But the laws of the mass can be studied in ordinary collections of people who are not abnormally excited, who are not subjects for pathologists. The laws of the mass as of the mob are, it is true, the laws of suggestion and imitation, but the mob is such an extreme case of the mass that it is necessary to make some distinction between them. Emotion in the crowd as in the mob is intensified by the consciousness that others are sharing it, but the mob is this crowd emotion carried to an extreme. As normal suggestibility is the law of the mass, so abnormal suggestibility is the law of the mob. In abnormal suggestibility the controlling act of the will is absent, but in normal suggestibility you have the will in control and using its power of choice over the material offered by suggestion. Moreover, it must be remembered that emotional disturbance is not always the cause of the condition of suggestibility: the will may lose its ascendancy from other causes than excitement; suggestibility often comes from exhaustion or habit.
The fact is we know little of this subject. Billy Sunday and the Salvation Army, political bosses and labor agitators, know how to handle crowds, but the rest of us can deal with individuals better than with the mass; we have taken courses in first-aid to the injured, but we have not yet learned what to do in a street riot or a financial panic.
Besides the group and the crowd and the mob, there is also the herd. The satisfaction of the gregarious instinct must not be confused with the emotion of the crowd or the true sense of oneness in the group. Some writers draw analogies from the relation of the individual to the herd to apply to the relation of man to society; such analogies lead to false patriotism and wars. The example of the wild ox temporarily separated from his herd and rushing back to the “comfort of its fellowship” has adorned many a different tale. The “comfort” of feeling ourselves in the herd has been given as the counterpart of spiritual communion, but are we seeking the “comfort” of fellowship or the creative agonies of fellowship? The latter we find not in herd life, but in group life.