The principal ground of the low order of intelligence displayed by simple crowds is that the ideas and reasonings which can be collectively understood and accepted must be such as can be appreciated by the lower order of minds among the crowd. These least intelligent minds bring down the intelligence of the whole to their own level. This is true in some degree even of crowds composed of highly educated persons; for, as in the case of the emotions and sentiments, the higher faculties are always more or less specialised and differentiated in various ways through differences of nurture and training; whereas the simpler intellectual faculties and tendencies are common to all men.
A second condition, which co-operates with the foregoing to keep the intellectual processes of crowds at a low level, is the increased suggestibility of its members. Here is one of the most striking facts of collective mental life. A crowd impresses each of its members with a sense of its power, its unknown capacities, its unlimited and mysterious possibilities; and these, as I have shown in Chapter III of my Social Psychology, are the attributes that excite in us the instinct of subjection and so throw us into the receptive suggestible attitude towards the object that displays them. Mere numbers are capable of exerting this effect upon most of us; but the effect of numbers is greatly increased if all display a common emotion and speak with one voice; the crowd has then, if we are in its presence, a well nigh irresistible prestige. Hence even the highly intelligent and self-reliant member of a crowd is apt to find his critical reserve broken down; and, when an orator makes some proposition which the mass of the crowd applauds but which each more intelligent member would as an individual reject with scorn, it is apt to be uncritically accepted by all alike; because it comes to each, not as the proposition of the orator alone, but as a proposition which voices the mind of the crowd, which comes from the mass of men he sees around him and so comes with the power of a mass-suggestion.
A further ground of the suggestibility of the crowd is that prevalence of emotional excitement which was discussed in the foregoing pages. It is well recognised that almost any emotional excitement increases the suggestibility of the individual, though the explanation of the fact remains obscure. I have suggested that the explanation is to be found in the principle of the vicarious usage of nervous energy, the principle that nervous energy, liberated in any one part of the nervous system, may overflow the channels of the system in which it is liberated and re-enforce processes initiated in other systems. If this be true, we can see how any condition of excitement will favour suggestibility; for it will re-enforce whatever idea or impulse may have been awakened and made dominant by ‘suggestion.’ The principle requires perhaps the following limitation. Emotion which is finding outlet in well-directed action is probably unfavourable to all such ‘suggestions’ as are not congruent with its tendencies. It is vague emotion, or such as finds no appropriate expression in action, that favours suggestibility. The most striking illustrations of the greatly increased suggestibility of crowds are afforded by well-authenticated instances of collective hallucination, instances which, so long as we fail to take into account the abnormal suggestibility of the members of crowds, seem utterly mysterious, incredible, and super-normal.
Again, the capacity of crowds to arrive at correct conclusions by any process of reasoning is apt to be diminished in another way by the exaltation of emotion to which, as we have seen, they are peculiarly liable. It is a familiar fact that correct observation and reasoning are hampered by emotion; for all ideas congruent with the prevailing emotion come far more readily to consciousness and persist more stably than ideas incongruent with it, and conclusions congruent with the prevailing emotion and desire are accepted readily and uncritically; whereas those opposed to them can hardly find acceptance in the minds of most men, no matter how simple and convincing be the reasoning that leads to them.
The diminution or abolition of the sense of personal responsibility, which results from membership in a crowd and which, as we have seen, favours the display of its emotions, tends also to lower the level of its intellectual processes. Wherever men have to come to a collective decision or to undertake collective action of any sort, this effect plays an important part. The weight of responsibility that would be felt by any one man, deciding or acting alone, is apt to be divided among all the members of the group; so that for each man it is diminished in proportion to the number of persons taking part in the affair. Hence the attention and care devoted by each man to the task of deliberation, observation, or execution, are less keen and continuously sustained, and a judgment or decision is more lightly and easily arrived at, grounds which the individual, deliberating alone, would reject or weigh again and again serving to determine an immediate judgment. The principle is well recognised in practical life. We do not set ten men to keep the look-out on ship-board, but only one; though the safety of the ship and of all that it carries depends upon his unremitting alertness. We see the principle recognised in the institution of the jury. But for the weakening of the individual sense of responsibility, juries would seldom be found capable of finding a prisoner guilty of murder and so condemning him to death; while, by the restriction of the jury to a comparatively small number, the worst features of collective mental life are avoided.
We see the working of the principle not only in simple crowds, but also in groups of very considerable degrees of organisation. We see it in the way in which many a man, who would shrink from the responsibility of directing a great and complicated commercial undertaking, will cheerfully join a board of directors each of whom is perhaps no better qualified than himself to conduct the business of the concern. We may recognise its effects also in the cheerful levity, not to say hilarity, that frequently pervades our House of Commons; for most of its well-meaning members would be utterly crushed under the weight of their legislative responsibility, were it not divided in small fractions among them.
But the low sense of responsibility of the crowd is not due to the division of responsibility alone. In the case of the simple crowd, it is due also in large part to the fact that such a crowd has but a very low grade of self-consciousness and no self-regarding sentiment; that is to say, the members of the crowd have but a dim consciousness of the crowd as a whole, but very little knowledge of its tendencies and capacities, and no sentiment of love, respect, or regard of any kind for it and its reputation in the eyes of men. Hence, since the responsibility falls on the whole crowd, and any loss or gain of reputation affects the crowd and hardly at all the individuals who are merged in it, they are not stimulated to exert care and self-restraint and critical deliberation in forming their judgments, in arriving at decisions, or in executing any task collectively undertaken. The results of these two conditions of collective mental life are well summed up in the popular dictum that a corporation has no conscience.
Since all these factors co-operate to keep the intellectual activity of the simple crowd on a low level, it follows that very simple intellectual processes must be relied on by the orator who would sway a crowd; he must rely on abuse and ridicule of opponents, or unmeasured praise of friends; on flattery; on the argumentum ad hominem; on induction by simple enumeration of a few striking instances; on obvious and superficial analogies; on the evocation of vivid representative imagery rather than of abstract ideas; and, above all, on confident assertion and reiteration, and on a display of the coarser emotions.
Since the individuals comprised in a crowd are apt to be influenced in all these ways by the mass of their fellows, it follows that the mental processes, the thoughts and feelings and actions, of each one will be as a rule very different from what they would be if he faced a similar situation as an isolated individual; the mental processes of each one are profoundly modified by his mental interactions with all the other members of the crowd. Therefore the collective actions of a crowd are not simply the resultants of all the tendencies to thought and action of the individuals, as such, but may be very different from any such resultant. And they are not merely the expression of the individual tendencies of the average member, nor yet of the mass of least intelligent and refined members; they may be, and often are, such as no one of the members acting alone would ever display or attempt.
It must be added that all the peculiarities of collective mental process mentioned above express themselves very readily in the actions of simple crowds, because such a crowd is incapable of resolution and volition in the true sense of the words. I have shown[28] that individual resolution and volition are only rendered possible by the possession of a well-developed self-consciousness and self-regarding sentiment. But a simple crowd has at the most only a rudimentary self-consciousness and has no self-regarding sentiment. Hence its actions are the direct issue of the various impulses that are collectively evoked; and, though it may be collectively conscious of the end towards which it is impelled, and though all the individuals may desire to effect or realise this end, and to that extent may be said to be capable of purpose; yet such an impulse or desire cannot be steadied, strengthened, renewed, or supported and maintained, in opposition to any other impulse that may come into play, by an impulse springing from the self-regarding sentiment in the way which constitutes resolution and volition. Just so far as the self-regarding sentiment of individuals comes into play and they exert their individual volitions, they cease to act as members of a crowd. The actions of the simple crowd are thus not the outcome of a general will, nor are they the resultant of the wills of all its members; they are simply not volitional in the true sense, but rather impulsive. They are comparable with the actions of an animal rather than with those of a man. It is the lack of the conditions necessary to collective resolution and volition that renders a crowd so fickle and inconsistent; so capable of passing from one extreme of action to another, of hurrying to death the man whom it glorified at an earlier moment, or of turning from savage butchery to tender and tearful solicitude. Such incapacity of the crowd for resolution and volition, together with the increased suggestibility of its members, accounts for the fact that a crowd may be easily induced to follow as a leader any one who, by means of the elementary reasoning processes suited to its intellectual capacity, can succeed in suggesting to it the desirability of any course of action.