Matthias's Reviews > The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

First published in 1895, this anti-populist sociological rant - ahem, essay - was ahead of its time, and predated many topics that much later became popular in social psychology, political science, and the behavioral sciences at large.

Some of Le Bon's brilliant intuitions:
- the increasing importance and power of the masses in an increasingly industrialized and democratic world
- individuals become less rational once they become part of a large group: increased susceptibility to imitation (anticipating Girard); emotional statuses spreading in a similar way to a viral contagion (nowadays we see computational social scientists trying to model this); peer pressure and social conformity (many years later demonstrated by Solomon Asch's experiment, which was then replicated by neuroscientist Gregory Berns)
- large groups' positive reaction to content communicated with violent conviction and purely emotional reasoning, independently of its being true or false, and lukewarm or negative reaction to complex truths and presentations that care for preciseness
- the demand for authoritarianism increases in large groups, just like the demand for illusions
- the intertwining of both a top-down and bottom-up process: Le Bon rejects both the views that the decision-making power is completely in the hands of the masses or of the elites; rather, he sees a dynamic in which crowds look for a master to submit to ("A crowd is a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without a master"), and then a leader (who, in reality, inevitably represents a small minority) appears to meet such demand and give the crowd an identity
- the hypnotizing power that prestige (status) has on influencing large groups; the crowd will follow the people with prestige, regardless of how incorrect and manipulative they are (and will ignore the ones without prestige, regardless of how correct and honest they are); "It is terrible at times to think of the power that strong conviction combined with extreme narrowness of mind gives a man possessing prestige"
- the vicious cycle caused by influence blindly following prestige: once prestige disappears, influence falls together with it; in fact, the crowd will not just stop following the fallen heroes, but also react violently against them in a form of revenge (this part also reminded me of Girard)
- the possibility of mass behavior having evolutionarily selected aspects ("they appear to be guided by those mysterious forces which [...] we call the voices of the dead, and whose power it is impossible to overlook, although we ignore their essence. It would seem, at times, as if there were latent forces in the inner being of nations which serve to guide them")
- some basic key tools effective leaders (who "have always been unconscious psychologists") use to communicate to crowds, including an observation of what decades later will be called the framing effect (this part predates what Cialdini popularized 90 years later)
- the fallacy of advocating a restriction of voting rights to the supposedly "more educated" (more than one hundred years later, analyses by Dan Kahan and others are showing to which extent this intuition was correct)

Le Bon's prose is very readable, clear and fluid. His points are often repetitive, but the work is overall quite short. Some ideas are outdated and now unscientific, but it's normal for a social science book written in those times. The biggest flaw I can find is the pessimistic tone pervading the analysis, but it's quite difficult to dismiss it once one considers how the dynamics individuated by Le Bon played a role in the rise of the destructive totalitarian regimes of the following century - and, in any case, such pessimism is not present in an extremist and oracular/prophetic form like in, say, Spengler. In conclusion, The Crowd still remains an enjoyable, insightful read even after such a long time from its first publication.