(3) The group may have a continued existence and a more or less elaborate and definite organisation independently of the individuals of which it is composed; in such a case the individuals may change while the formal organisation of the group persists; each person who enters it being received into some more or less well-defined and generally recognised position within the group, which formal position determines in great measure the nature of his relations to other members of the group and to the group as a whole.
We can hardly imagine any concourse of human beings, however fortuitous it may be, utterly devoid of the rudiments of organisation of one or other of these three kinds; nevertheless, in many a fortuitous concourse the influence of such rudimentary organisation is so slight as to be negligible. Such a group is an unorganised crowd or mob. The unorganised crowd presents many of the fundamental phenomena of collective psychology in relative simplicity; whereas the higher the degree of organisation of a group, the more complicated is its psychology. We shall, therefore, study first the mental peculiarities of the unorganised crowd, and shall then go on to consider the modifications resulting from a simple and definite type of organisation.
Not every mass of human beings gathered together in one place within sight and sound of one another constitutes a crowd in the psychological sense of the word. There is a dense gathering of several hundred individuals at the Mansion House Crossing at noon of every week-day; but ordinarily each of them is bent upon his own task, pursues his own ends, paying little or no regard to those about him. But let a fire-engine come galloping through the throng of traffic, or the Lord Mayor’s state coach arrive, and instantly the concourse assumes in some degree the character of a psychological crowd. All eyes are turned upon the fire-engine or coach; the attention of all is directed to the same object; all experience in some degree the same emotion, and the state of mind of each person is in some degree affected by the mental processes of all those about him. Those are the fundamental conditions of collective mental life. In its more developed forms, an awareness of the crowd or group as such in the mind of each member plays an important part; but this is not an essential condition of its simpler manifestations. The essential conditions of collective mental action are, then, a common object of mental activity, a common mode of feeling in regard to it, and some degree of reciprocal influence between the members of the group. It follows that not every aggregation of individuals is capable of becoming a psychological crowd and of enjoying a collective life. For the individuals must be capable of being interested in the same objects and of being affected in a similar way by them; there must be a certain degree of similarity of mental constitution among the individuals, a certain mental homogeneity of the group. Let a man stand on a tub in the midst of a gathering of a hundred Englishmen and proceed to denounce and abuse England; those individuals at once become a crowd. Whereas, if the hundred men were of as many races and nations, their attention would hardly be attracted by the orator; for they would have no common interest in the topic of his discourse. Or let the man on the tub denounce the establishment of the Church of England, and the hundred Englishmen do not become a crowd; for, although all may be interested and attentive, the words of the orator evoke in them very diverse feelings and emotions, the sentiments they entertain for the Church of England being diverse in character.
There must, then, be some degree of similarity of mental constitution, of interest and sentiment, among the persons who form a crowd, a certain degree of mental homogeneity of the group. And the higher the degree of this mental homogeneity of any gathering of men, the more readily do they form a psychological crowd and the more striking and intense are the manifestations of collective life. All gatherings of men that are not purely fortuitous are apt to have a considerable degree of mental homogeneity; thus the members of a political meeting are drawn together by common political opinions and sentiments; the audience in a concert room shares a common love of music or a common admiration for the composer, conductor, or great executant; and a still higher degree of homogeneity prevails when a number of persons of the same religious persuasion are gathered together at a great revival meeting. Consider how under such circumstances a very ordinary joke or point made by a political orator provokes a huge delight; how, at a concert, the admiration of the applauding audience swells to a pitch of frantic enthusiasm; how, at the skilfully conducted and successful revival meeting, the fervour of emotion is apt to rise, until it exceeds all normal modes of expression and men and women give way to loud weeping or even hysterical convulsions.
Such exaltation or intensification of emotion is the most striking result of the formation of a crowd, and is one of the principal sources of the attractiveness of the crowd. By participation in the mental life of a crowd, one’s emotions are stirred to a pitch that they seldom or never attain under other conditions. This is for most men an intensely pleasurable experience; they are, as they say, carried out of themselves, they feel themselves caught up in a great wave of emotion, and cease to be aware of their individuality and all its limitations; that isolation of the individual, which oppresses every one of us, though it may not be explicitly formulated in his consciousness, is for the time being abolished. The repeated enjoyment of effects of this kind tends to generate a craving for them, and also a facility in the spread and intensification of emotion in this way; this is probably the principal cause of the greater excitability of urban populations as compared with dwellers in the country, and of the well-known violence and fickleness of the mobs of great cities.
There is one kind of object in the presence of which no man remains indifferent and which evokes in almost all men the same emotion, namely impending danger; hence the sudden appearance of imminent danger may instantaneously convert any concourse of people into a crowd and produce the characteristic and terrible phenomena of a panic. In each man the instinct of fear is intensely excited; he experiences that horrible emotion in full force and is irresistibly impelled to save himself by flight. The terrible driving power of this impulse, excited to its highest pitch under the favouring conditions, suppresses all other impulses and tendencies, all habits of self-restraint, of courtesy and consideration for others; and we see men, whom we might have supposed incapable of cruel or cowardly behaviour, trampling upon women and children, in their wild efforts to escape from the burning theatre, the sinking ship, or other place of danger.
The panic is the crudest and simplest example of collective mental life. Groups of gregarious animals are liable to panic; and the panic of a crowd of human beings seems to be generated by the same simple instinctive reactions as the panic of animals. The essence of the panic is the collective intensification of the instinctive excitement, with its emotion of fear and its impulse to night. The principle of primitive sympathy[15] seems to afford a full and adequate explanation of such collective intensification of instinctive excitement. The principle is that, in man and in the gregarious animals generally, each instinct, with its characteristic primary emotion and specific impulse, is capable of being excited in one individual by the expressions of the same emotion in another, in virtue of a special congenital adaptation of the instinct on its Cognitive or perceptual side. In the crowd, then, the expressions of fear of each individual are perceived by his neighbours; and this perception intensifies the fear directly excited in them by the threatening danger. Each man perceives on every hand the symptoms of fear, the blanched distorted faces, the dilated pupils, the high-pitched trembling voices, and the screams of terror of his fellows; and with each such perception his own impulse and his own emotion rise to a higher pitch of intensity, and their expressions become correspondingly accentuated and more difficult to control. So the expressions of each member of the crowd work upon all other members within sight and hearing of him to intensify their excitement; and the accentuated expressions of the emotion, so intensified, react upon him to raise his own excitement to a still higher pitch; until in all individuals the instinct is excited in the highest possible degree.
This principle of direct induction of emotion by way of the primitive sympathetic response enables us to understand the fact that a concourse of people (or animals) may be quickly turned into a panic-stricken crowd by some threatening object which is perceptible by only a few of the individuals present. A few persons near the stage of a theatre see flames dart out among the wings; then, though the flames may be invisible to the rest of the house, the expressions of the startled few induce fear in their neighbours, and the excitement sweeps over the whole concourse like fire blown across the prairie.
The same principle enables us to understand how a few fearless individuals may arrest the spread of a panic. If they experience no fear, or can completely arrest its expressions, and can in any way make themselves prominent, can draw and hold the attention of their fellows to themselves, then these others, instead of perceiving on every hand only the expressions of fear, perceive these few calm and resolute individuals; the process of reciprocal intensification of the excitement is checked and, if the danger is not too imminent and obvious, the panic may die away, leaving men ashamed and astonished at the intensity of their emotion and the violent irrational character of their behaviour.
Other of the cruder primary emotions may spread through a crowd in very similar fashion, though the process is rarely so rapid and intense as in the case of fear[16]. And in every case the principal cause of the intensification of the emotion is the reciprocal action between the members of the crowd, according to the principle of sympathetic induction of emotion in one individual by its expressions in others.