Trump and the irrationality of crowds. A problem for us all.

The recent ‘insurrection’ in Washington DC, by supporters of outgoing President Trump, reminded many of us of other events in history involving crowds, like the Storming of the Bastille.  The blog post that follows is on the topic of crowds, but it is not about history.  Rather it attempts to think about the psychological processes that are on display in crowd settings.  Some crowds are better described as mobs when demagogues like Trump seek to incite his followers to commit violent acts in the name of a political cause.

A mob/crowd becomes a coherent entity whenever a large group gathers for some common purpose.  Random collections of people who happen to be together do not constitute a crowd in the sense that I am trying to describe.  The crowd which has some sense of common purpose will also have some rudimentary structure to accomplish its purposes.  It may come into being as the result of a dramatic political event like a revolution.  Alternatively, it may be formed to support a football team, playing a crucial match.  Some crowds are deliberately created by the activities of a demagogic leader like Trump or Mussolini.  In a political setting, a crowd/mob can turn into something really powerful and even frightening.  Governments and people in authority have known over the centuries to fear the mob.  It is not just the fact that a thousand people armed with the simplest of weapons can do a lot of damage to their surroundings; it is also the fact that the sheer energy of a crowd that comes into being, when roused by a leader, can unsettle peaceful cooperation within communities for years.  Thousands of people united into a crowd by a common purpose do and have changed history.  America will never be the same after the events in Washington on the 6th January 2021.

The study of crowd psychology has always fascinated me.  This is in spite of the fact that nearly all of the dedicated literature on the topic originated abroad and even today I am not aware of a single scholar in the UK who is currently writing on the subject. I may of course simply be out of date but that is what I found when I tried some years ago to do some serious reading on the subject.

What is crowd psychology?  A better place to start is to ask the simple question.  What was my experience the last time I was part of a crowd?  It might have been as an onlooker at a football match.  It might have been as a theatre goer or as an attender at a large Christian charismatic gathering.  It may have been when attending a political gathering of some kind.  Some of us avoid crowds precisely because we dislike what we feel they do to us.  As a broad generalisation we can suggest that in a crowd we feel depersonalised; our being in a crowd changes the nature of our consciousness.  Whatever kind of crowd (or group) we are in, there will be some level of change in the way we experience the outside world.   In many crowd situations, people are aware of a powerful pressure to merge, partly or completely, with the thinking and feeling of the other people in the group.  This would be especially true of a political gathering. (There have also been many studies of the pressures felt by members of juries to conform)  When Trump spoke to crowds of his supporters, he knew exactly when to introduce the uniting chant of ‘lock her up’ or ‘stop the steal’.  It takes quite a determined act of will by individuals in the crowd not to join in such chanting.  How much easier it is to go with the flow and shout with the rest?

The first popular book on the topic of crowd psychology was by a Frenchman, Gustave Le Bon.  He was writing in the 1890s, so his reflections were available to the 20th century political orators, especially Benito Mussolini and Hitler.  Le Bon’s observations resonated with the time.  Governments everywhere were aware of the raw power of revolutionary movements involving mobs, such as the French Revolution or the other revolutions that disrupted many European countries in 1848.  There was an appetite to understand and thus perhaps control or channel this raw energy which could be such a threat to the established order.

Le Bon was, according to his critics, not an original thinker but a populariser.   We in Britain can forgive him this, since, in translation, his book, The Crowd, was the very first attempt to get the English reader to think about the topic of crowds, using the available tools of psychology.  He began with the basic observation that a crowd is, psychologically, a different reality from an accidentally gathered group of people.  A crowd in this understanding can always be said to have a common purpose.  It is this common purpose which has brought it to occupy the same physical space at the same time.  The one who participates in the collective mind or common passion/cause of a crowd will very quickly discover that the dominant thought of the group is one that quickly and easily comes to fill the individual’s consciousness.  In this way the crowd makes the group into a single being or subject.  In Le Bon’s words, we discover ‘the law of the mental unity of crowds’.

From these observations we can repeat the idea that individual thinking, feeling and acting work differently according to whether we are in a crowd or alone.  When we are in a crowd, our experiencing and feeling seem to draw on a primal, even primitive level of functioning.  This is one that all human beings share in common.  The more individual creative and intelligent parts of human functioning, those that we each build up over a lifetime, seem to drop away.  Instead of intelligent processing of information, Le Bon noticed the way that the individual in the crowd operates out of the more primitive and instinctive parts of the psyche.  There is a failure to consult intellect or reason and this results in the crowd/mob’s tendency to embrace extremes of political/religious thinking. Such extremes are articulated in the political ideologies on the ultra-right or left. Religious extremism can also be rooted in the same primitive and sub-rational roots.  The crowd is not the context for weighing up and considering dispassionately competing views and opinions. It will prefer members to use the simplified slogans and propaganda ideas given to it by the leaders. Among the many changes that can take place in a crowd is the ability for the individual to feel enormously powerful.  There is a sense of being able to tap into the power of the group so that some feel invincible and thus indestructible.  There is also a susceptibility to what Le Bon calls contagion.  In other words, a idea suggested by the leader through the tools of propaganda can come very quickly to occupy and even take over the awareness of every single member of the crowd.  This capacity for identical feelings and sensations to spread rapidly across crowds, helps us to have an appreciation for the dynamics of crowds in other contexts.  Some of us have experienced some similar dynamics in Christian charismatic settings.

In short, the immersion of the individual in a crowd/mob can have the effect that he/she is persuaded to behave in a way that may be quite contrary to their non-crowd behaviour.  Usually individual behaviour is something which is rooted in reason and personal morality.  In the crowd there is a kind of hypnotic fusion with others in the group and this may result in behaviour quite out of character and contrary to the normal system of personal values.  This hypnotic and primal group way of thinking or not thinking can sometimes result in impulsive risk taking and a failure to look after one’s best interests.  Sometimes this impulsive risk taking is interpreted as human courage.   But simultaneously a capacity for sacrificial self-giving is sometimes accompanied by a new potential for ferocity, hatred and violence.  This is never seen in the person’s normal life.  Another way of putting it is to suggest that in a crowd, the individual slips down the ladder of civilisation.  Acts of apparent heroism appear alongside those of hatred and brutality. 

The dying days of Trump’s presidency, especially the events of January 2021, have given us some insight into the primal and toxic behaviour of crowds.  Ironically, many who are part of the Trump mass cult see themselves as Christian, being normally moral and selfless human beings working for a higher cause.  The reality for them in a crowd seems quite different.  Thanks to crowd studies initiated by Le Bon over a hundred years ago, we can see taking place an eruption of primitive impulses into American society.  Some of these have been activated in a physical crowd setting while the same primitive passions may have been caused by the virtual crowd settings created through the internet.  Many of these will take a generation or more to heal.  The ability of politicians (and churchmen) to understand better these dynamics, will perhaps protect all of us from the malign effects of crowd/mob thinking and behaviour in the years to come.  Sadly, I do not detect that there is much understanding in our national or church life for these insights or even a desire to make this exploration.   Failing to understand crowds and crowd behaviour will make us potentially far more vulnerable to their disastrous and damaging impact.

About Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a retired Anglican priest living at present in Cumbria. He has taken a special interest in the issues around health and healing in the Church but also when the Church is a place of harm and abuse. He has published books on both these issues and is at present particularly interested in understanding how power works at every level in the Church. He is always interested in making contact with others who are concerned with these issues.

7 thoughts on “Trump and the irrationality of crowds. A problem for us all.

  1. Many thanks. There is also this famous work of Charles Mackay (1841), ante-dating Le Bon: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm.

    Le Bon’s work was contemporary with that of Gabriel Tarde (‘Penal Philosophy’ and ‘The Laws of Imitation’, both of 1890). His thoughts on ‘reciprocal imitation’, for example, seem especially apt in the age of social media: “Suppose a somnambulist should imitate his medium to the point of becoming a medium himself and magnetising a third person, who, in turn, would imitate him, and so on, indefinitely. Is not social life in this very thing?” (LI, at 84). Tarde and Le Bon were soon followed by Boris Sidis (‘The Psychology of Suggestion’, 1898), E. A. Ross (‘Social Control’, 1901), Wilfred Trotter (‘The Instinct of the Herd in Peace and War’, 1915), Everett Dean Martin (‘The Behavior of Crowds’, 1920), William McDougall (‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, 1922), and Walter Lippmann (‘Public Opinion’, 1922 and ‘The Phantom Public’, 1925). These texts, in addition to those of Freud and Durkheim, remain seminal with respect to this subject, but Freud in particular was actively engaged on this subject with such luminaries as George Simmel, Theodor Adorno, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Robert Musil, Wilhelm Reich and Arnold Zweig, who all had much to say on the subject. The best study of Le Bon remains that of Robert Nye: ‘The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic’ (1975; amongst other things Le Bon was, of course, trying to account for the phenomenon of Ernest Boulanger, the failed Brutus of the Third Republic, and a dramatic flash in the political pan of 1889, but the prelude to Pujo, Vaugeois, Maurras and Daudet, Dreyfus, the Croix de Feu, the Camelots du Roi, Vichy, Poujade, Le Pen, etc.).

    More recent students of the subject include Christian Borch, Ernesto Laclau, Jeffrey Schnapp, Johann Arnason, David Roberts, R. A. Berk, Serge Moscovici, Michel Maffesoli, etc., etc. Two recent studies in an abundant literature have made an impression on me: ‘Demographically diverse crowds are typically not much wiser than homogeneous crowds’ by Stephanie de Oliveira and Richard Nisbett in ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America’, February 27, 2018, vol. 115, no. 9, 2066-2071′ and ‘The Pandemic Crowd’ by Paolo Gerbaudo in Journal of International Affairs, Spring/Summer 2020, vol. 73, no. 2, at 61-76. Gerbaudo remarks: “What…pandemic riots share is the fact that they are often not called by established social movement organizations, but by new leaders and groups that often have a limited level of coordination…They correspond to a form of protest action that has long problematically been considered as “pre-modern” or akin to “primitive rebellion” but in fact has never disappeared from the public sphere, even in…modernized…

    1. …countries.” (at 72).

      Sorry, yet again my machine was telling me that I had more characters to spare than was actually the case.

  2. There are some economics in the paucity of material available. It’s a very broad subject and there is an almost limitless amount published on individual components of the problem, such as neuroscientific discovery around intracerebral components like mirror neurones which are active when we intuit from each other, or the myriad of psychologies which are expanding and diversifying.

    But there’s little money in integration. Academia rarely exists in isolation. Students need jobs ultimately. In a profession. With end users who can see an answer to their problems.

    Corporations, which we’ve seen acting with bizarre irrational and often corrupt purposes, don’t really want to pay for someone to point this out to them.

    I’ve found organisations which study some of the phenomena we’ve seen in “crowd behaviour” and then realised that these organisations are fraught with dysfunction themselves. Fear, for example, is a predominant emotion leaking out of the papers available.

    Regarding “popularisers” may I suggest that we don’t dismiss them completely. What they lack in academic rigour and long words, they do occasionally make up for by their clarity of communication and ability to reach a wide audience of the very people we are trying to reach with our own ideas.

    It takes years, decades, sometimes centuries to break through and challenge damaging social behaviours such as we saw in DC, and for that challenge to be accepted. There’s a long way to go.

  3. The influence of being in a crowd may explain why people who are ‘converted’ in a mass rally are less likely to stick with it than those who find faith through Christian friends (I don’t have the stats but I know I’ve read this somewhere).

    Evangelists like Billy Graham use crowd psychology deliberately. Graham had trained ‘counsellors’ sitting among the crowd at his rallies, and his call for those who wanted to find Jesus to ‘get up out of your seats and come forward’ was the signal for those counsellors to stand up and start moving down to the front. The punters naturally thought lots of people were responding to the altar call and this made it easier for them to do so too. Other evangelists who ask people to shut their eyes and bow their heads while those who want to follow Jesus raise their hand, and have been known to call out repeatedly ‘I see that hand’, when no one has in fact responded. This serves the dual function of encouraging the reluctant to raise their hand, and giving the illusion that the evangelist is more successful than he is – useful when encouraging donations to the ‘ministry’.

    I’ve seen the crowd effect work powerfully in charismatic meetings, sometimes in a very disturbing way. The worst occasion was at one of Wimber’s Kansas City Prophets conferences where mass hysteria swept the congregation of 2000, and at my estimate 80% of them fainted where they stood. After that I became very interested in the manipulation of crowds. I met with a small group of people in the congregation (a consultant neurologist, a history lecturer who’d made a study of 18thC revivals, and 2 musicians) for several months while we looked into the factors at play in this kind f religious ministry. Soon afterwards the Toronto Blessing swept through charismatic churches.

    I’ve been post-charismatic ever since.

    1. And the other cliches: ‘Hands are going up all over this auditorium’ (sometimes true, sometimes not); and the vaguer ‘All over this building…’ which (being verbless) has the ‘virtue’ of not actually being a lie, but its use of the power of suggestion is scarcely honest or Christian. Some (with what authority or accuracy I do not know) cited Kundalini spirituality in attempting to ‘place’ and characterise some Toronto phenomena (and some on-stage church semi-hypnotic phenomena).

      The otherwise excellent Open Air Campaigners had as clear policy that the members mixed with the crowd and acted as though they were absorbed listeners to the presentation.

      As for UK writers on crowd psychology (something that shows up on an entire societal level as media push certain narratives and the populace rushes to demonstrate that they are not in the perceived minority) Douglas Murray’s recent book ‘The Madness of Crowds’ could be mentioned.

  4. The crowd involved in the Capitol insurrection looked to me to have been “played”. I actually watched live as they broke through the token security and they seemed unsure of what to do next once inside, almost as if they hadn’t expected to get that far.

    When you look back now at the impact of what they “achieved” it’s almost the exact opposite of what they might have hoped for. Trump may in effect have had his political career terminated rather than carrying on as a potential candidate for 2024. The crowd’s antics have been used against him. Of course we can only make inferences from a distance, but the security looked woefully inadequate, perhaps deliberately so?

    Put it another way, if you wanted to oust Trump for good, what was the most effective way of doing it? This perhaps.

    Now security is very tight indeed. To save face and further loss of life, I would be surprised if the US authorities allow another incursion in the ensuing few days.

    But these are complex matters. 70 million people voted for Trump, and very few were coerced by a crowd. American acquaintances did vote for him and represented to me that OUR media distorted the picture for us in the U.K. Who is to say that we’re not in a crowd and being manipulated?

    As Stephen points out, the internet is now a powerful locus for crowd manipulation. Warning signs for me are heavy left or right leading, or binary simplistic black/white rhetoric.

    1. Some of the crowd were unsure where to go and what to do, but others came well prepared and more familiar with the building’s layout than they had any right to be.

      There are a number of suspicious circumstances, including the initial refusals and subsequent delays in calling out the National Guard. I suspect it will be. along time before we know all or even most of the facts, but Trump’s forthcoming impeachment trial in the Senate will probably bring more evidence to light.

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