Skip to content
Published on

The Psychology of Crowds — Why We Become Someone Else in a Crowd

🇰🇷KO🇺🇸EN🇯🇵JA
Split View필사 모드
Authors

Opening — The Magic of the Square

Picture the stands at a football match. The mild-mannered office worker who is usually so reserved is now red-faced and singing at the top of his lungs, his arm slung over the shoulder of a stranger beside him. At a concert, when tens of thousands chant the same lyric at once, something electric runs through us. What turns us into a different person from the one we usually are?

The crowd is one of humanity's oldest riddles. It has changed history in revolutionary squares and bred tragedy under the sway of panic. The same kinds of people gather, yet one crowd weeps at a charity concert while another hurls stones in the middle of a riot. This essay follows a single question: why do people become different when they form a crowd?

Let me make one promise up front. This essay will not dismiss crowds as simply foolish or dangerous. Nor will it romanticize them. The classic theories of crowd psychology are a tangle of insight and prejudice, and modern research has refined the insight while clearing away the prejudice. We will look at both sides and leave the final judgment to you.

Starting From a Single Scene

Before the discussion proper, let us picture a scene. You, normally calm and reasonable, are standing in the middle of an enormous throng. Everyone faces the same direction, chants the same slogan, is swept by the same emotion. In that moment your own heart races too, and before you know it the same cry escapes your lips.

Here is a question. Is the you of that moment the same person as the you who sits alone at a desk and considers the same topic calmly? If they differ, what made the difference? Did that throng take something from you, or did it draw out something that usually stays hidden?

There is no single right answer to this question. But carry it as you read, and you will see far more clearly how we change within a crowd and where that change comes from. For crowd psychology is, in the end, an inquiry into the distance between "me within the throng" and "me alone."

Le Bon's Crowd — A Starting Point and a Battleground

No discussion of crowd psychology can skip one name: Gustave Le Bon, the nineteenth-century Frenchman. His 1895 book, The Crowd (Psychologie des foules), is widely regarded as the field's point of departure.

Le Bon belonged to a generation that had watched crowds pour into the streets in the wake of the French Revolution. He described the crowd almost as a new kind of organism. When individuals gather into a crowd, he argued, their conscious individuality dissolves and a kind of "collective mind" emerges.

Le Bon's portrait of the crowd can be summarized this way:

  • Anonymity: In a crowd the individual loses a name. Responsibility blurs, so people more readily do what they would never do alone.
  • Contagion: Emotions and behaviors spread from person to person like an epidemic.
  • Suggestibility: The crowd, like a person under hypnosis, is easily swayed by outside suggestion.

Because of these traits, Le Bon believed crowds were impulsive, given to exaggeration, and quick to respond to simple slogans. His book was enormously influential. From political leaders to advertisers, many sought to learn from him how to move a crowd.

But we cannot stop here, because Le Bon's theory carries a distinct shadow.

The Case Against Le Bon

Today's social psychologists do not accept Le Bon's claims at face value. The core criticisms run as follows.

First, Le Bon painted the crowd as an overly uniform and irrational mass. Real crowds are not so homogeneous. Even a single protest contains people with many different motives and positions.

Second, his perspective is steeped in the class and period prejudices of his time. He carried the wary, condescending gaze of an elite uneasy about the masses in the streets.

Third, the claim that "individuality vanishes and a collective mind appears" is closer to an unverifiable metaphor than a testable account. Modern research holds that the individual in a crowd does not lose a self but rather shifts into a different kind of identity. We will return to this point.

In short, Le Bon asked an important question, but his answer bore the limits of his age. Take him as a starting point, never as a destination.

Deindividuation — The Two Faces of Anonymity

Some of Le Bon's intuitions were sharpened by later research. One of them is the concept of deindividuation.

Deindividuation refers to the psychological state that arises when a person, buried in a group, feels anonymous and pays less attention to the self. When the inner gaze that monitors our own behavior weakens, conduct that strays from our usual norms becomes easier.

A Thought Experiment: The Night of Masks

Try a simple thought experiment. Give the same person two situations. In one, they stand under bright lights wearing a name tag. In the other, they wear a mask, blended into a darkened crowd. In which situation is bolder, more out-of-character behavior more likely?

Intuitively, most people picture the latter. Anonymity and darkness create the sense that no one is watching. Indeed, studies have found that under conditions of heightened anonymity, people sometimes behave more aggressively or break norms more readily.

An Important Twist

But there is an important twist. Anonymity does not always pull bad behavior out of us.

Research suggests that in a deindividuated state, what people follow is the norm that happens to prevail in that group at that moment. If the group's mood is one of kindness and cooperation, anonymity can draw out more generous behavior instead. Think of the anonymous volunteers at a blood drive, or the strangers helping one another at a disaster site.

In other words, anonymity is not a lever that pushes behavior in only one direction. It is closer to a loudspeaker that amplifies whatever the group takes to be right. The same mask yields entirely different behavior depending on which stage you stand upon.

This insight revises Le Bon's old image once more. The idea that anonymity in a crowd simply turns a person into a beast was an oversimplification. What anonymity reveals is not a person's hidden savagery but the norm that governs that group in that moment. So rather than saying "the crowd makes people bad," it is more accurate to say "the crowd amplifies the values the group holds." This small difference moves our gaze toward the crowd from fear to understanding.

Conformity — Asch's Line Experiment

Now we turn to one of the most famous experiments in crowd psychology: the conformity study run in the 1950s by the American psychologist Solomon Asch.

The setup was startlingly simple. A participant sits at a desk with others and looks at two cards. One card shows a single reference line; the other shows three lines of differing lengths. The task is to say which of the three matches the reference line. The answer is obvious to anyone.

The trap lay elsewhere. Everyone except the participant was a confederate of the experimenter. At prearranged moments, they would all confidently announce the same wrong answer, even though it was plainly incorrect.

What Did People Do?

Your own eyes clearly see a different answer, yet everyone around you says otherwise. How does the participant behave?

A substantial share of people went along with the wrong majority at least once. Instead of trusting their own eyes, they matched their answer to the voices around them. Of course, some held to their own judgment to the end. But the fact that people wavered even when the majority was plainly wrong was itself striking.

There is a fascinating detail here. If even a single "ally of truth" stood among those giving the wrong answer, the participant's tendency to follow the majority dropped sharply. Standing alone against the many is hard, but with just one comrade, a person finds the courage to keep their own judgment.

Two Kinds of Conformity

Asch's experiment reveals at least two textures of conformity.

Informational conformity: "Everyone sees it that way; maybe I'm wrong?"
            → When information is scarce, we use others as cues.

Normative conformity: "My answer is right, but I don't want to stand out."
            → To avoid rejection, we conform on the surface.

When the answer is obvious, as with the length of a line, normative conformity dominates. By contrast, in ambiguous and difficult situations, informational conformity grows stronger. Telling apart whether we follow a crowd because we truly believe, or merely because we do not want to stand out, is the starting point for understanding ourselves.

This distinction is useful in daily life too. If you find yourself nodding when everyone in a meeting nods, it is worth a moment's reflection. Do I truly agree, or am I just uncomfortable being the lone dissenter? Whoever can answer that honestly is at least someone who knows when they conform and when they truly agree. That knowledge alone moves us a step away from blind conformity.

Obedience — Milgram's Experiment and Its Weight

A phenomenon both like and unlike conformity is obedience. If conformity is "peer pressure," obedience is "submission to authority."

In the 1960s, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram posed a heavy question: would an ordinary person, following an authority's instructions, go so far as to harm another?

The design ran as follows. The participant played the "teacher" and was told to deliver increasingly strong electric shocks to a "learner" in another room each time the learner answered incorrectly. An experimenter in a white coat urged them to continue. In truth the shocks were fake and the learner's anguished reactions were acted, but the participant did not know this.

A Result That Unsettles Us

The result unsettled many. A considerable number of participants, under the direction of authority, followed instructions to what seemed a dangerous level. Not because they were especially cruel. They were ordinary citizens, and many trembled and broke into a cold sweat in distress, yet could not stop.

The experiment has been disputed on many fronts. The psychological burden placed on participants drew heavy ethical criticism, and a study of this kind would be hard to permit today. Later researchers also note that the original figures and interpretations should be re-read with more care. So we should not read this experiment as proof that "anyone will commit evil if only ordered to."

The Lesson That Remains

Even so, the central question Milgram raised still weighs on us: how easily can we set aside our own conscience before authority?

Even in Milgram's data, it matters that some people stopped. And when the conditions changed, the degree of obedience changed dramatically. When the authority was far away, when a peer nearby refused, or when the victim was visible up close, people defied instructions far more often. This suggests that obedience is not a fixed feature of human nature but a product of the situation. The same person behaves differently depending on the conditions they are placed in.

This connects with the "single ally" finding from the conformity experiment. That obedience dropped sharply when one peer nearby refused first follows the same principle by which a single truth-teller gave the participant courage in Asch's study. When we speak up first for what is right, we not only guard our own conscience but hand a thread of courage to someone else who is wavering. Even within the dark stories of obedience and conformity, the light one person's courage creates is unmistakably real.

Group Polarization — Together, Toward the Extreme

Another face of crowd psychology is group polarization: the tendency for people, after gathering to discuss, to drift toward a more extreme conclusion than where they began.

Intuitively this sounds odd. Shouldn't many people together converge on an average and grow more moderate? In reality, the opposite often happens.

Why Toward the Extreme

Group polarization arises for a few reasons.

1. Accumulation of new arguments
   When like-minded people gather, they keep supplying one another
   with fresh reasons that support their position. As reasons pile up,
   conviction hardens.

2. Social comparison
   People want to occupy a "respectable position" within their group.
   When the group has a clear direction, taking one more step that way
   feels like earning more approval.

3. Strengthening of identity
   The stronger the sense of "this is the kind of people we are,"
   the more one leans toward a stance that fits that identity.

Group polarization works for good and for ill. The hardening of resolve for social reform and the intensifying of hostility toward a particular group can both be explained by the same mechanism. The mechanism itself is neither good nor evil. What matters is the direction in which the energy is aimed.

Fashion and Bubbles — The Waves a Crowd Makes

Crowd psychology is not only in street protests or the supporters' stand. It seeps deep into what we buy, what we like, and what we stake our money on.

The Contagion of Fashion

Picture a trend in which a certain style, a certain turn of phrase, a certain object suddenly becomes everyone's. Fashion is well explained by the contagion and conformity we saw earlier. What a few started spreads quickly as people copy one another. The conformity of "others are doing it, so I will too" makes a wave, and the larger that wave grows, the more those who have not joined feel left behind.

What is interesting is that the intrinsic value of a thing is often not decisive in how a trend spreads. Sometimes things spread because they are good, but the very fact that many people like something can also make it look more desirable. The informational conformity we saw earlier is at work. The inference "if this many people chose it, it must be good" accelerates the wave.

Bubbles and the Rush of Fear

When this rush runs to an extreme, a bubble can form. History repeatedly offers cases in which people swarmed enthusiastically toward something, then at some moment poured out the same way and suffered great turmoil. The episode in seventeenth-century Holland, when the price of certain flower bulbs soared abnormally and then collapsed, is often told as an old symbol of the bubble a crowd's rush can make.

Crowd psychology underlies these rushes too. Everyone is buying, so I buy, and so the price rises, and as it rises more people pile in. Then the mood shifts and the same crowd runs the opposite way at the same speed. Both the optimism on the way up and the fear on the way down are waves of emotion that spread from person to person.

A Balanced View

Yet there is no need to dismiss all fashions and rushes as irrational madness. Fashion creates culture and gives people shared joy and belonging. Even within a market rush there is usually some rational judgment that has spotted real value. The key is to pause and tell apart whether what draws me to something now is its real value or merely the fact that many people are heading that way. We need the balance to enjoy the crowd's waves without being wholly swept away by them.

Is the Crowd Always Foolish? — Evidence for the Other Side

So far we have mostly examined the crowd's perilous side. For balance, we must look at the other side too. Crowds can be astonishingly wise.

Cases of Collective Intelligence

There are situations in which a crowd produces a more accurate answer than any individual. A common example is an estimation task. Ask many people separately to guess the number of candies in a large jar, the weight of an ox, or the likelihood of some event, then average their answers, and the result is often surprisingly close to the truth, closer than a single expert's.

This phenomenon is often called the "wisdom of crowds." When individuals' errors scatter in different directions, averaging tends to cancel them out.

But there is a condition. For the wisdom of crowds to work, people's judgments must be independent, their opinions diverse, and each must hold some information of their own. If everyone hears the same rumor and sways in the same direction, it is no longer wisdom but herd behavior. What separates a wise crowd from a foolish one is not the number of people but the independence and diversity of their views.

A paradox surfaces here. Conformity and the wisdom of crowds point in opposite directions. Conformity makes people resemble one another and converges their judgments to a single point, whereas the wisdom of crowds works precisely when that resemblance breaks, that is, when people judge differently and independently. So the same crowd grows foolish when people watch and copy one another, and wise when each judges with their own head. The secret to preserving the wisdom of crowds lies, paradoxically, in "not resembling one another too much."

Social Identity — A New Way to See the Crowd

Recall that Le Bon believed individuality "vanishes" in a crowd. Modern social psychology has substantially revised this view, with social identity theory at its center.

On this account, a person in a crowd does not lose a self. Rather, the center of gravity of identity shifts from "me as an individual" to "me as a member of a group."

Think of people seated in the same supporters' stand. They have not lost themselves; they have redefined themselves through a shared identity, "fans of our team." That is why they feel an instant kinship with strangers and sing the same songs. Their behavior is often not chaotic madness but orderly conduct that follows "the norms of our group."

This view is borne out by research on crowds at disasters and accidents. In a crisis, people do not simply trample one another to flee, as they are so often depicted doing. Often, strangers swiftly come to share an identity as "us, going through this together," and help one another. The crowd is not inherently a dangerous mob; it is a being that shows entirely different faces depending on which identity and norms are activated.

Panic and the Crowd — The Moment of Crisis

No discussion of crowd psychology can omit one scene: people surging toward an exit when fire or accident breaks out. We commonly imagine such scenes as "a panicked crowd losing its reason and trampling one another." Films and the news often show that image.

Yet studies of actual disaster scenes overturn much of this commonplace. In crises people often behave far more orderly and cooperatively than expected. They support strangers, yield the way, and try to send the weak out first. The "every-one-for-themselves bedlam" is closer to the exception; calm mutual cooperation is in fact more common.

Why It Differs From the Commonplace

The social identity view we saw earlier helps explain this difference. People going through the same crisis swiftly form a shared identity of "us, who must survive together." Once that identity is activated, people treat one another as collaborators rather than competitors.

Of course, conditions for genuine panic exist too: when exits are too few, when time is desperately short, or when information is cut off so that no one knows what is happening. But even then, the heart of the problem is often not "because people are foolish" but "because the environment made cooperation impossible." A crowd's tragedy commonly arises not from the crowd's nature but from poorly designed space and an absence of information.

This insight has practical implications. Rather than blaming people's mindset, providing ample exits, clear guidance, and accurate information is the surer path to safety. To understand the crowd is less to condemn it and more to build the conditions in which it can behave well.

The Bystander Effect — When Everyone Is Present and No One Helps

In one dark corner of crowd psychology lies the bystander effect: the paradox that when someone is in danger, the more people present, the slower help may come.

Intuitively, more people should mean more potential helpers. Yet in reality the opposite often unfolds. Why?

The Diffusion of Responsibility

The core principle is the diffusion of responsibility. If I am the only witness, the responsibility to help rests entirely on me. But if many people are watching together, the thought creeps in: "someone else will surely do it." As responsibility scatters across many, the weight each person feels grows lighter.

Another psychology adds to this. People look around when they do not know how to act. But if everyone is equally looking around and staying still, each misreads it: "since everyone is staying put, it must be nothing serious." The informational conformity we saw earlier amplifies the silence. While everyone watches everyone else, the very action that is needed is deferred.

From Bystander to Actor

Fortunately this effect can be broken. One method research consistently points to is naming. Shouting vaguely "someone please help" diffuses responsibility, but pointing to a specific person — "you, in the blue shirt, please call the emergency line" — concentrates responsibility on that person and starts action.

And knowing about the bystander effect is itself the first step out of it. When the thought "there are many people, someone will do it" arises, whoever recognizes it as a signal of diffused responsibility can step past the trap and reach out first. This is exactly where understanding crowd psychology stops being mere knowledge and turns into better action.

The Crowd and Authority — The Mechanics of Demagoguery

Looking back through history, crowds were often wielded as a vast force in the hands of powerful leaders or demagogues. This was one of the reasons Le Bon feared the crowd. So by what principles does the demagoguery that drives a crowd in one direction work?

Simple Messages and Repetition

The first tool of demagoguery is simplicity. Complex logic loses its power within a crowd. Instead, short, intense, repeated slogans lodge in people's minds. A simple story that sharply divides "us" from "them" spreads far more easily than complex reality.

The Mobilization of Emotion

The second tool is emotion, especially fear, anger, and belonging. Fear binds people together, anger generates energy toward an enemy, and belonging gives the warm unity of "our side." Emotional mobilization is often faster and more powerful than rational persuasion at moving a crowd.

Naming an Enemy

The third tool is to create a common enemy. People unite most easily before a common foe. With a clear external enemy, internal cohesion hardens and voices of criticism are easily branded as "betrayal." The group polarization we saw earlier works powerfully in this process.

A Balanced View

Yet balance is needed here too. The mechanism that moves a crowd is not itself evil. The very same principles serve to ignite just movements. Simple, intense messages, the sharing of emotion, and the solidarity of "us" work equally to gather people against injustice. It was this force that moved so many hearts in Martin Luther King's speeches.

So the key is not to abolish "the art of moving a crowd" but to stay awake to where that art is aimed and whether its message rests on truth. Just as the same flame can become a lamp or a fire, the crowd's energy yields entirely different outcomes depending on its direction.

The Spiral of Silence — A Minority That Looks Like a Majority

There is an intriguing concept that explains how opinion forms within a crowd: the spiral of silence.

People grow reluctant to express their opinion when they feel it belongs to a minority, for fear of isolation or blame. But when those holding one opinion fall silent, the opposite opinion comes to look more numerous than it really is. Then more people lean toward the side that appears to be the majority, or at least fall silent. In this way one opinion sounds ever louder while the other grows ever quieter, forming a spiral.

The frightening thing about this phenomenon is that the actual majority opinion and the "opinion that looks like the majority" can differ. A loud minority can overwhelm a silent majority. When we feel that "everyone in the world thinks that way," it is not easy to tell whether that is truly the majority's view or merely the louder voice.

The spiral of silence works alongside the conformity, group polarization, and echo-chamber effect we saw earlier, distorting our perception of public opinion. That is why a healthy society needs spaces where minority opinions can speak safely without falling silent. Just as a single ally gave courage to the participant in Asch's experiment, one person who voices a minority view first can become the thread that unwinds the spiral of silence.

The Online Crowd — The Square Moves Into the Screen

The stage of crowd psychology no longer stays in the physical square. Today the largest crowds live inside screens. Online space amplifies the old principles of crowd psychology in new ways.

Features of the Digital Square

  • Heightened anonymity: In many online spaces, people hide behind pseudonyms. The conditions for the deindividuation effect we saw earlier are more easily met.
  • Speed and scale: The contagion of emotion and information happens at the speed of light. A single post can reach millions within hours.
  • Algorithmic mediation: Recommendation systems tend to gather like-minded people in one place, creating fertile ground for group polarization.
  • Echo-chamber effect: When you hear only similar opinions over and over, they begin to feel like the majority view of the world.

A Balanced View

We need not see the online crowd in purely negative terms. The same mechanism also does good. When disaster strikes, relief information spreads in an instant; scattered and vulnerable people unite to make their voices heard; criticism of wrongful power rallies quickly.

The problem is not the tool itself but the content and direction it amplifies. The online crowd is a giant loudspeaker. Before it, the task of consciously choosing what we say and what we refuse to be swept up in grows ever more important.

New Phenomena of the Digital Crowd

The online crowd, both like and unlike the offline crowd, produces a few distinctive phenomena. Let us look a little closer.

Fast to Gather, Fast to Disperse

Gathering people in a physical square takes time and effort. Online, a single post summons an enormous throng in an instant. This rapid gathering wields remarkable power. Scattered people raise the same voice at once and create pressure to right a wrong.

But a swiftly gathered crowd disperses just as swiftly. A throng assembled by a wave of emotion alone, without deep reflection or sustained commitment, shifts its attention the moment the next topic appears. The power of rapid gathering and the limit of shallow persistence are two sides of the digital crowd's coin.

Clashes of Identity

Online, debate often spills beyond an exchange of opinions into a clash of identities. When a stance on some topic is tightly bound to "who I am," the other side's rebuttal feels less like a rebuttal of an opinion and more like an attack on my very being. People then fight to defend their camp rather than over the facts. The group polarization and the spiral of silence we saw earlier further inflame this process.

Between Anonymity and Real Names

Interestingly, the behavior of online crowds varies greatly with the degree of anonymity. Under full anonymity the deindividuation effect appears strongly, while in spaces where real names and reputation are at stake people grow far more careful. This fits exactly the deindividuation theory we saw earlier. It also means that how an online space is designed largely governs how people behave within it.

Staying Awake Within the Crowd — Practical Wisdom

We have surveyed the many faces of crowd psychology. So how can we keep our own center within a crowd? This is not a call to reject the crowd; the crowd sometimes makes us braver and more generous. It is simply a set of small wisdoms for choosing instead of being swept along.

1. Pause for a moment
   When the reasons "everyone does it," "the authority says so,"
   "our side is heading that way" arise, pause one beat before acting.

2. Ask the source
   Trace where the anger or conviction you feel right now came from.
   Is it your judgment, or a contagious emotion?

3. Be the one ally
   When the majority heads the wrong way, one person voicing a different
   view can unwind the spiral of silence. Try being that one person.

4. Expose yourself to diversity
   Step out of the echo chamber and deliberately seek other views.
   Diversity of opinion is the condition for the wisdom of crowds.

5. Name the action
   In an emergency, instead of "someone help,"
   make a specific request of a specific person.

These wisdoms share one thing: they create a small gap between the crowd's current and yourself. In that gap, we can tell apart being swept along from choosing. To understand the crowd is, in the end, to learn how to hold our own rudder even upon its current.

A Comparison to Pull It Together

Let us compare the phenomena we have examined at a glance.

ConceptCore questionHow it worksTwo-sidedness
DeindividuationHow do we act when anonymousWeakened self-monitoring, following group normsCan be violent or generous
ConformityWhy do we follow the majorityLack of information, avoiding rejectionBasis of cooperation, risk of blindness
ObedienceWhy do we submit to authorityDelegation of responsibility, situational pressureFoundation of order, risk of numbed conscience
Group polarizationWhy do groups go extremeArgument buildup, social comparisonHardened resolve, deepened division
Wisdom of crowdsWhy do crowds grow smartCancellation of independent errorsCollapses when diversity breaks

One pattern emerges from this table: none of these phenomena has only one face. The same mechanism yields opposite results depending on the situation.

And if you gaze at the right-hand column, the two-sidedness, another insight rises. What decides which face appears is usually the "situation" and the "conditions." Not because people are inherently good or evil, but because which norm they are within, what information they meet, and what environment they are placed in is what divides the outcome. This may be the most hopeful message crowd-psychology research gives us. If a crowd's behavior is not a fixed nature but the product of conditions we can change, then by designing better conditions we can draw out the crowd's better face.

A Small Self-Check Quiz

Let us lightly revisit what we have read. Form an answer to each question, then check it against the explanations below.

Question 1. In Asch's line experiment, what was the decisive factor that made participants less likely to follow the wrong majority?

Question 2. Why does anonymity in a deindividuated state not always draw out aggressive behavior?

Question 3. What are the two key conditions for the wisdom of crowds to work properly?

Here are the explanations.

Question 1: When even a single ally spoke the truth against the majority,
            the participant's odds of holding their own judgment rose sharply.
            The sense of not being alone gives courage.

Question 2: In a deindividuated state, a person does not lose the self
            but follows the group's norm at that moment. If that norm is
            cooperation and kindness, more generous behavior follows.
            Anonymity is not a direction but an amplifier.

Question 3: Independence of judgment and diversity of opinion. When people
            judge independently with different information rather than
            copying one another, their errors cancel out.

Closing — Questions for the Self Within the Crowd

The crowd is neither a thing to fear nor a thing to revere. It is closer to a mirror that reflects ourselves. Within a crowd we grow braver than usual, and also more cowardly. More generous, and also more cruel. What matters is the wakefulness to notice which way the crowd is pushing us.

Le Bon feared the crowd; modern research seeks to understand it more precisely. If there is one thing we can learn from both vantage points, it is the capacity to ask ourselves, "Why am I acting this way right now?" Because the majority does it, because the authority says so, because our side is heading that way — if we can pause for a moment before these three reasons, then instead of being swept up by the crowd, we can walk alongside it.

If there is one message running through this essay, it is that nearly every phenomenon of crowd psychology has two sides. Deindividuation becomes violence or becomes generosity. Conformity becomes blindness or becomes the basis of cooperation. The art of moving a crowd inflames hatred or ignites a just movement. That the same mechanism yields opposite results reminds us that the crowd cannot be sorted simply into good and evil.

So what we need is not a heart that fears or hates the crowd but the wakefulness to understand it. Whoever understands the crowd can both turn its force toward the good and guard themselves against its dangerous rushes. We pass through countless crowds across a lifetime. If within them we can stay connected to others without losing ourselves, that may be the most precious wisdom crowd psychology has to teach.

At the start of this essay we pictured the office worker in the stands and the crowd at the concert. Let us return to that scene now. They looked different from usual not because they were foolish but because human beings are made to be deeply connected with others. That we change within a crowd may be the clearest evidence of all that we are not solitary beings. For what we use that power of connection — that choice always remains the portion of each of us who stays awake.

Food for Thought

  • Was there a recent choice you made because "everyone was doing it"? Was it informational conformity, or normative?
  • Does the online space you belong to widen the diversity of opinion, or narrow it?
  • If a single ally gives you the courage to stand against the many, could you be that one ally for someone else?
  • Recall a moment when you acted differently than usual within a crowd. Were you losing yourself, or shifting into a different identity?
  • Have you ever witnessed an emergency and thought "someone will surely do it"? Knowing the bystander effect now, how might you act differently next time?
  • Have you ever doubted whether an opinion you hold strongly is truly your own independent judgment or a conviction caught from those around you?

References

Discuss on Twitter • View on GitHub