The psychology of crowd dynamics

Crowds are the elephant man of the social sciences. They are viewed as something strange, something pathological, something monstrous. At the same time they are viewed with awe and with fascination. However, above all, they are considered to be something apart. We may choose to go and view them occasionally as a distraction from the business of everyday life, but they are separate from that business and tell us little or nothing about normal social and psychological realities. Such an attitude is reflected in the remarkable paucity of psychological research on crowd processes and the fact that it is all but ignored by the dominant paradigms in social psychology. The second edition of The Handbook of Social Cognition (Wyer & Srull, 1994) has no entry in the index under ‘crowd’. Indeed, within a discipline that often views literature from a previous decade as hopelessly outdated, the little reference that is made to such research still tends to focus on Gustave Le Bon’s work from a previous century (Le Bon, 1895). As we shall shortly see, it is most clearly reflected in the content of Le Bon’s research and that of his followers. It was Le Bon, in terms of his theories if not his practices, who divorced crowds from their social context. His theory assumed that crowd participato