Everett Dean Martin

The Behavior of Crowds Everett Dean Martin

["THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS" by Evrett Martin with his essay entitled "THE MOB MIND VS. CIVIL LIBERTY" in the POSTFACE.] The "motivation" of this book is the author's conviction that crowd formation and crowd thinking are daily becoming a more serious menace to civilization. "I know of nothing," he says, "which today so menaces, not only the values of civilization, but also - it is the same thing in other words, perhaps - the achievement of personality and true knowledge of self as the growing habit of behavior as crowds." Few students of social psychology will be disposed to deny the danger, or fail to share the author's apprehension. The crowd (not the group) is a social nuisance, and the formation of crowds is made increasingly easy by the rapid development of the technique of intercommunication. (...) But is crowd behavior really psychopathic? Is crowd-mindedness really a disease? If so, it is practically universal, for there are few indeed who are not affected by the influence of one or more crowds. We are all crowd men more or less. Would it not be more accurate to say that crowd behavior is analogous in some respects to that of the neurotic? It certainly sometimes resembles that of the lunatic! But there is nothing pathological, strictly or "in a sense," in, for instance, the antics of a college crowd celebrating a football victory. Such phenomena are wholly explicable on the basis of normal instincts and impulses. (...) Reference of crowd motivation to the unconscious is, of course, as the author is well aware, nothing new. He quotes a page from Le Bon in which that author says, "It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious .... that in crowds become common property." But this book probes deeper than Le Bon. It makes practically no use of the suggestion-imitation principle. Many will regard this as a weakness. The author admits that suggestion and imitation do play a larger part in determining our thinking, but he sees "no reason why they should be more operative in causing the crowd-mind than in other social situations". Is it not because the crowd, in which the attention of many is strongly and narrowly focused and the emotions abnormally stimulated, presents a social situation peculiarly conducive to their operation? None of the foregoing observations are designed to belittle the value of this book or its method. Merely as a revealer of the dangers of crowd formation and crowd thinking, of the hypocrisies, insincerities, and asininities of crowds, and the necessity of a new method of education to counteract their influence and to prevent their formation, it is one of the best books on the subject thus far published. No student of social psychology can afford to overlook it. Its wide reading by the public would be an excellent antidote to crowd formation and the dangers of crowd thinking. - Ira Woods Howerth, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 1.