ABSTRACT
One of the enduring questions in social science relates to whether decent individuals are prone to behave indecently when banded together in a group. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Le Bon (1895) formulated the first systematic analysis of this problem. He proposed that shared membership in a group puts people “in possession of a sort of collective mind” (p. 27). This collective mind was thought to be primitive, irrational, and destructive. Floyd Allport (1924) is well known for his criticism of Le Bon’s crowd mind concept. Nevertheless, in his later writings, Allport proposed that “even if we got rid of the crowd mind, the problem of describing the differential of crowd-like behavior…would remain” (1962, p. 6).
