The Crowd

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a book that claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement or the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others…. According to Gustave Le Bon, an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state. This state much resembles that of fascination in which an individual finds himself when hypnotized by another person.