Le Bon conjectured about a “magnetic influence” at work within crowds. McDougall mused about the possibility of “telepathic communication.” Even the psychoanalyst Carl Jung got into the act, advancing the notion of a shared “genetic ectoplasm” that bound a group of people as one. Ultimately the entire field collapsed under its own imprecision and incoherence. The notion of a group mind “slipped ignominiously into the history of social psychology,” writes one observer. It was “banished from the realm of respectable scientific discourse,” notes another. Social scientists took as their near
...more
