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Gustave Le Bon

Decent Essays

In the light of the reading materials for this unit, I will try discuss the crowd of Gustave Le Bon which is a study of popular mind. In his book one, Le Bon has shown us several characteristics of the crowd psychology such as “impulsiveness, irritability, and incapacity to reason, the absence of judgments of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and so forth” (Wikipedia.org). Le Bon defined “Crowd in its ordinary sense as means a gathering of individuals of whatever nationality, professor, or sex, and whatever the chances that have brought them together” (web.archive.org). Le Bon claimed “that an individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grain of sand, which the mind stirs up at will” (Wikipedia.org).
“From the psychological point of view the expression "crowd" assumes quite a different signification. Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it” (web.archive.org).For Le Bon, “the sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take …show more content…

In his book, “Le Bon has also detailed three key processes that create the psychological crowd: noted as anonymity, contagion, and suggestively” (Wikipedia.org). For Le Bon, “Anonymity provides to rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility. An individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional. This lack of self-restraint allows individuals to "yield to instincts" and to accept the instinctual drives of their "racial

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