ABSTRACT
The study of groups in the early days of social psychology focused upon the fear that the group or crowd context could undermine the rationality and morality of the individual. This was at the root of Le Bon’s concept of ‘group mind’ (see Chapter 1) and informed much of the later study of ‘social influence’. According to Parker (1989) ‘The prospect of crowd phenomena seizing individual minds haunted American social psychologists’ (p. 36) and ‘Opposition to the crowd and attempts to safeguard individual autonomy were held together by the method of laboratory experimentation. Such a method produced its own mechanistic caricature of the rational individual . . .’ (p. 37). Parker sees F.H. Allport’s insistence upon the pre-existing individual, whose ‘original nature’ was merely modified by social factors that could be discovered by experimentation, as partly fuelled by a fear that Le Bon may be right and a consequent desire to prove him wrong. Le Bon’s theory apparently arose from his witnessing terrifying episodes of crowd behaviour at the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, and although many aspects of his ‘group mind’ theory have since been discredited (he claimed that the crowd member is reduced to the activities of the spinal cord and is in a state of evolutionary regression) his view that crowd members become anonymous and lose their identity remained influential, for example in Zimbardo’s (1969) concept of ‘deindividuation’. The flavour of the concept is evident from the title of this work: ‘The human choice: individuation, reason and order versus deindividuation, impulse and chaos’.
