Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War

by Wilfred Trotter

Originally published in 1919, this classic work of social psychology introduces the concept of "the herd instinct" in relation to human behavior and explores the fundamental importance of gregariousness among animals as well as among humans.

In addition, author Wilfred Trotter incisively draws on the concept of social habit to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of human behavior as well as its affect on the national morale - particularly in times of war. As Trotter noted in his original publication, these ideas may also be of use to "a tired nation seeking peace."

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, War, Politics, Political Science

268 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1990

Reviews

[Xenophon Hendrix · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War by Wilfred Trotter because it was heavily referenced in Crystalizing Public Opinion by Edward Bernays. Instincts of the Herd isn't a report of scientific evidence based on controlled experiments. Rather, it is an essay of speculative deductions based on taking the nature of man as a social animal seriously.

First off, the title is misleading. The book isn't about crowd psychology. It's about the effects on individual psychology of being a social animal. In the first two chapters, which were originally a long journal article published in two parts in 1908 and 1909, the author posits a herd instinct in human beings to go along with the classic drives for self-preservation (these days called "fight or flight"), food, and sex. This strikes me as not unreasonable. We human being are social animals who are reliant on the group for long term survival.

Wilfred Trotter then explains the ramifications of our needing to fit in with the group, and provides several examples drawn from life. For example, human beings tend to be much more sure that their opinions are correct than is warranted by their knowledge of the facts. I suspect that most thoughtful persons have considered the ideas in these chapters already, but it is nice to have them gathered together in a neat package. I don't know if the result is capital "T" Truth, but it might be a useful mental model, and it does throw light on our current political situation.

After laying the groundwork, the author, while admitting the oversimplification, divides human beings into the "resistive" and the "unstable." The resistive are those who adapt themselves to their social group by either ignoring the experiences that don't fit the beliefs absorbed from their group or by rationalizing them until they become acceptable. The resistive are the pillars of society. On the other hand, the unstable are those who tend to notice that what they have been taught doesn't match what they have experienced. The unstable are the misfits.

In the next section of the book, originally published in 1916, the author speculates about various facets of human inherent gregariousness and its effects. Unfortunately, it's often difficult to follow just what he is trying to say. For instance, at one point he appears to be endorsing socialism, but I'm not sure. Indeed, the biggest fault of the book is the author's prolix, old-fashioned style. His point often is buried under a pile of words. His sentences have a tendency to become so long that the predicate moves out of hailing distance of the subject, and one is forced to reread to figure out what the author is trying to say. I estimate the book could have been shortened by at least twenty-five percent by omitting needless words and by the author simply saying what he means. To the extent that I can decipher the meanderings, though, I believe it is a great deal of nonsense.

Finally, in the postscript written after World War One, the author again becomes somewhat intelligible. His comparison between societies led by a segregated upper class and societies led by those being pushed upward at need from social homogeneity working toward a common goal is of interest.

The book is out of copyright and easily available online.

[Tim McKay · Rating 2 out of 5]

All based on deduction, no empirical evidence.

[Rudyard L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

First half was very good. Second half was propaganda

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

present day views have minimized the role instincts play in human behavior -- we falsely view man as being "above them," or able to control/minimize their effects

trotter argues our resistance to insticnt is a result of them clashing with society's morals/values -- this is a natural conflict given his argument that humans are naturally gregarious -- there will always be a battle between internal desire and societal expectations to conform -- instincts that cannot be acted upon due to societal constraint are then transmuted by the individual into some other form or emotion

he pushes back against the point many academics have implicity seemed to hold that instincts have far less influence on man than in the past -- rather he argues modern man has had more pressure to supress/transmute them to conform to the herd -- instincts have no less power than before


he further argues that gregariousness is one of the fundamental instincts of man -- this has a variety of implications once held accepted as true
- consciousness, or our awareness of our behavior as right or wrong, is a product of being gregarious -- in other words we only have an internal, subjective view of our behavior because we are social, and we have the knowledge that others can judge us -- without this there the internal conflict mentioned above no longer exists
- he uses the analogy of the cat and dog to elucidate this difference -- given both animals committ the same act of eating from the plate of the human, it is only the dog who appears to possess some internal feeling of shame for the behavior, as seen in his sulking eyes and diminished posture. the cat, however, mererly runs from punishment, with no subjective feeling of having committing a bad act

another interesting example he brings up is that of the bee hive -- while the hive is made up of individual bees, it more functions like a single unit because each bee has forsaken autonomy to be a part of the hive -- the individal bee is "a priori" dedicated to the hive, with no interests of its own. its instincts drive it to be in accordance with the hive, not towards its own selfish instincts. Therefore, the accumulation of bees all mindlessly working towards the goals of the hive turn the hive into a single unit. Humans, however, present a more challenging case where individual desires conflict with social unity. many of our political parties have turned into a sort of bee hive in which individual subscribers have defaulted to any views taken by their part at the expense of individual, original thought.
- the main thesis here is that the more complex the organism, the more they are influenced by individal instincts


speaking of man's need for leadership in times of war, states: (relates to modern day politics, appeal of trump)
"A people at war feels the need of direction much more intensely than a people at peace, and as always they want some one who appeals to their instinctive feeling of being directed, comparatively regardless of whether he is able in fact to direct. This instinctive feeling inclines them to the choice of a man who presents at any rate the appearance and manners of authority and power rather than to one who possesses the substance of capacity but is denied the shadow. They have their conventional pictures of the desired type—the strong, silent, relentless, the bold, outspoken, hard, and energetic—but at all costs he must be a “man,” a “leader who can lead,” a shepherd, in fact, who, by his gesticulations and {118} his shouts, leaves his flock in no doubt as to his presence and his activity. It is touching to remember how often a people in pursuit of this ideal has obtained and accepted in response to its prayers nothing but melodramatic bombast, impatience, rashness, and foolish, boasting truculence; and to remember how often a great statesman in his country’s need has had to contend not merely with her foreign enemies, but with those at home whose vociferous malignity has declared his magnanimous composure to be sluggishness, his cautious scepticism to be feebleness, and his unostentatious resolution to be stupidity."

[Adam Ellsworth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Has some interesting ideas, but the core assertion is that no society to date has figured out how to effectively raise the “collective consciousness” of its citizens out of the passive & reflexive herd mentality that tends to segregate people by class lines, and into a mode of sustained intellectual engagement which simultaneously unifies everyone at the level of the national interest, breaking class barriers, and unlocking the untapped potential of the mind. ie group think is bad at the class or subgroup level, but good at the national level.
How this is to be accomplished, aside from pursuing some nebulous form of “scientific statesmanship”, he doesn’t say, but the short book is soaked in the progressive mindset of the era that, with our new powerful scientific tools & powers, we can reengineer society for the better and create a nation of idealists sharing a single, national goal... by getting them to think freely. (Telling, he uses bees, notably the single-minded alignment of worker bees in pursuit of the interest of the hive as the working model for this society.).
So if you’re studying this line of thought, the book may be interesting, but otherwise not sure I would recommend it.

[not-even-that · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considering the recent constructivist theories gaining traction in neuroscience, time seems ripe for challenging the concept of instinct as well, defended here by Wilfred Trotter. Notably, he differs from the traditional, Nietzschean brand of instinct fundamentalists in that he interprets man's capacity for submission to group interest as an instinct in its own right: the gregarious instinct of a pack animal. He lays out a theory based on natural selection where the subject of natural selection switches mid-way from individual to the group, which explains the submissions humans make themselves endure even when it would be possible to act otherwise.

In a way, his sharp-tongued efforts at dismantling the covert coping mechanisms of the supposedly harsh ideas of simple power instinct are admirable. He recognizes the necessity of postulating some other instinct besides sex, food and self-preservation to explain the behaviour of the pack, instead of interpreting pack-derived displays of self-effacing behaviour like self-overcoming as "will to power". The problem is that this additional gregarious instinct is a very strange instinct and differs remarkably from the other three instincts even according to Trotter himself. It is even a kind of "anti-instinct", according to him, nullifying the instinctual power of sex, food and self-preservation in favour of pack survival. The question arises: why insist on its instinctual nature in that case? Wouldn't an open minded interpretation classify it rather as something different if it is describes as something totally different?

The second problem is the transition of the unit of natural selection from the individual to the pack. According to Trotter, this process starts with the transition from unicellular life to multicellular entities, the next leap being the rise of the pack animal, with the pack representing a new type of organism. Here Trotter is clearly laying down groundwork for the so-called organic theories of state but, uncomfortably enough, from a decidedly non-right wing viewpoint. However, the basis of such a theory becomes fuzzy when you find that the text alternately explains the gregarious instinct by means of the natural selection unit-shift, while at other times reversing the causality by saying this is something enabled by gregarious instinct. In other words, he's arguing in a circle. The problem can also be stated more theoretically: If gregarious instinct means just the social instinct in individual animals, the job is to explain how it arose from a situation where it was just many individuals bottlenecked together, each possessing the instincts of self-preservation, sex, and food. How is a separate instinct born out of that combination, even if the animals are co-operating? If the explanation is that the animals selected by the bottleneck happened to be the ones with the social instinct, that also doesn't make sense since before that they were all individual animals, meaning that the selected "instinct" must be something different and fundamentally unrelated to the social group.

The obvious flaws of the theory of organic packs, states and nations did nothing to stop the success of the idea, with its easy of sliver of animism slathered over what purports to be a hard-headed recognition of instinctual reality. It's no better than referring to God or Spirit, even though certain highly regarded intellectuals provocatively argue against God while resorting religiously to the organic theory of groups. If anything, Trotter's version is even more insidious than that of Nietzsche et al. because it allows for a glib renunciation of the rah-rah, but places the difference completely within the group organism instead of to a more irreducible quality outside of it. The result is a cynical management program where people are told their gregarious pain is natural, that the group(managed by technocrats) has independent living existence, but that at least they're not a dumb reactionary that does not understand evolutionary science. It seems nothing too different from mythology, and one wonders whether it is not simply set out to execute what it purports to describe.

All this makes the book interesting as a document of the converging points of social democracy and movements like national socialism, and as such highly relevant to the precise juncture point we find ourselves at this moment. It is well known that both the Social Democrats and the National Socialists approved of the organic state theory, and the reality was an undemocratic technocracy. The opposition to neoliberalism, too, is mostly couched in evolutionary socialism or various retvrns, functioning as obvious "opposition politics" foils to it. This works in tandem with an infantilization of political discourse to the level of psychological table-talk(things "are done" because of manners, where's the empathy etc.) instead of principles, except in opposition politics easily mocked when government has all the actual power and magnanimously "allows" what little influence they have, out of a manner called "a liberal western country". The crux of the problem seems to be the core of this very book: the deification of the group as a a magical, animized entity. The book "Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity" might be a good starter for beginning to understand what might lie behind the curtain.

[Guy Versailles · Rating 3 out of 5]

The herd in war and peace

Interesting, probably outdated as far as social psychology goes, but useful to the study of the major ideas that were circulating in the early XXth century.

[Sam Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is important above all for its promotion of social psychology over individual psychology, as well as the (groundbreaking, as far as I am aware) parallels it draws between the two great enlargements of the biological organism in evolutionary history. Single-celled organisms evolved to become multicellular, and solitary animals evolved to become social, Trotter argues, for many of the same reasons, above all protection from natural selection and, through that protection, the ability for greater variation.

Trotter's equation of the nation-state with a biological organism in the latter part of the book, is, however, overly nationalistic and essentialist. Probably a product of his time. It reminds me somewhat of Tanabe Hajime's Logic of Species, a metaphysical justification of the pre-WWII totalitarian Japanese empire.

A good sequel? Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, which touches, expands and goes in different directions on a lot of the same ideas. For example, Freud says, "It is very likely that some of them – the bees, the ants, the termites – struggled for thousands of centuries until they evolved the state institutions, the distribution of functions, the restrictions on individuals, for which we admire them today (1930, 45)." Here Freud is making the same assumption as Trotter, namely, that ants and bees, like humans, evolved from solitary to social animals to create a new larger unit, like the individuals cells when they joined together to become multicellular.

[Keith]

again, like le bon's the crowd this is part of the study of movements and project j. Heard first about Wilfred Trotter from hedges. It showcases gregarinous as something innate and i wonder if that is what leaders (b/c groups are asking to be led) can take advantage of as the influence and sway the herd to what they want. A herd can be thought of as those who shop on black friday to gain acceptance by those closest to them in their herd (family, friedns) and allow them to gain influence in those small circles that are important to them and each other

[AttackGirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where is my review?

[Joshua Leach · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thoughts: https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/20...