Podcast
Stuff You Should Know
This book, written in 1895, was presented as the foundational text on crowd psychology, though much of its view was later considered outdated. The author posited that crowds inherently become mindless, form a collective mind, and are capable of anything, which the podcast hosts noted was often too focused on the negative aspects of crowds.
if there's a violent crowd then it was just full of violent people and there was a French psychologist named Gustave Lebon in 1895 who wrote the literal book on this like the first one called The Crow...
— Episode: How Crowds Work
Episode: How Crowds Work
This book, written in 1895, was presented as the foundational text on crowd psychology, though much of its view was later considered outdated. The author posited that crowds inherently become mindless, form a collective mind, and are capable of anything, which the podcast hosts noted was often too focused on the negative aspects of crowds.
if there's a violent crowd then it was just full of violent people and there was a French psychologist named Gustave Lebon in 1895 who wrote the literal book on this like the first one called The Crowd Colon A Study of the Popular Mind and it was very influential but this is one of those that's a little outdated in a lot of ways
his whole thing was like you have any crowd together they're inherently mindless they form a collective mind they become capable of anything they're very suggestible they're going to kill everybody in their path right
one thing I saw that I think it's part of social identity theory is that that depends on the mood of the group or the norms of the group so if it's like a group that is generally saying we're a peaceful protest somebody can come up and throw a Molotov cocktail and everybody else in the group is going to look at them like what the heck are you doing
Hitler and Mussolini both studied the works of Le Bon