ABSTRACT

Scientists may take a crowd apart and analyse the factors functioning in a crowd situation; it is not always so easy to put the factors together again into an account which does justice to the concussion of extreme crowd excitement upon an individual. In order to show how group response varies with drive stimuli and crowd stimuli, we have chosen the case of a lynching mob where all three factors are strongly present. The effort will be to isolate the factor of crowd stimulation and show its rôle in producing the violence of mob response.