Crowd psychology lowers individual responsibility and boosts influence susceptibility

Evidence

Even without being Nazis, most of us know the experience of being part of a crowd wild with excitement, and have an intuitive sense that the way our minds process information might change under such circumstances, even to the point that we might come to do something or begin to believe something different. If to pay attention is to open the mind to information, to do so in an animated crowd is to fling the doors wide open. To be exposed to any information is to be influenced, but in crowds the possibilities go well beyond everyday experience. Gustave Le Bon, the first theorist of crowd psychology, held that it is loss of individual responsibility that makes the individual in the crowd more malleable. Freud would say that the superego was supplanted by the will of the crowd, as unconscious wishes rise to the surface and are shared. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 399

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the crowd-attention mechanism: loss of individual responsibility (Le Bon) and superego supplanted by crowd will (Freud).
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s attention-industry thread: crowds as a technology of attention capture that predates modern advertising. — connects to: Instrumentation enables calculating and modifying individuals’ susceptibility to ideas — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1383; Crowd phenomena reduce to regressions in individual psyches, not group minds; Crowds arouse sub-individual instincts while organized groups transcend individuals — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 345 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Group anonymity and emotional arousal override individual moral judgment #corroborates (0.88) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 435
• Crowd phenomena reduce to regressions in individual psyches, not group minds #complicates (0.85)
• Freud explains crowd phenomena as individual regressions, not a group mind #complicates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 320
• Crowds arouse sub-individual instincts while organized groups transcend individuals #qualifies (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 345
• Belief-formation impact of others depends on their persuasiveness, proximity, and number. #expands (0.75) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1909
• Zero-sum framing of rivals enables depersonalization and rationalized harm #expands (0.72)