ABSTRACT
In the organization, the individual may feel helpless or apathetic, but he is not likely to experience panic or the threat of overwhelming anxiety, as he might in a therapy group or in a mob. Concerns about the group's threat to individuality are felt more strongly in therapy groups, mobs, and large, "impersonal" organizations than in small, face-to-face, task-oriented groups. A mob is comparable to one form of contagion in a small group, that in which a precipitating event finds the group unprepared so that there is no solution capable of coping with the affect elicited by the event. In therapy groups, the instances of deviation which we have observed always occur when conformity to the group standard could not be achieved without causing the individual intolerable anxiety. All groups have forces which are generated by the interaction of the members and, in turn, have an impact on the members.
