Crowd Psychology

The crowd, from the point of view of psychology, is initially unorganized (or lost organization) a lot of people who have no conscious common goals and usually are in a state of emotional arousal.

The crowd occurs in places where people are crowded with natural disasters, military exercises, mass spectacles, celebrations, protest or traffic congestions. The psychology of the crowd is complex and full of mysteries.

The crowd can be characterized by varying degrees of activity and level of emotional arousal. Psychology of the crowd depends on the nature of the formed group of people. For example, a crowd can be active (a conglomeration of aggressive people, prone to cruelty, violence and destructive actions, an accumulation of people fleeing panic). Sealing literature highlights the demonstrating type of crowd (a collection of people protesting). The crowd can be passive when it does not have an emotional component (a crowd of onlookers).

Psychology of the crowd is characterized by features that affect the behavior of its members. It's anonymity (people who have joined the crowd are sure that their actions will remain unnoticed, hence the feeling of lack of control and irresponsibility); Homogeneity (when all the mental manifestations of individuals are equalized to one general level and people are thoughtlessly affected by appeals and slogans); Suggestibility (this is an essential and weighty property of the crowd, which explains the unpredictability of its actions and the performance by people of actions that can absolutely contradict their consciousness and character).

In the crowd, spread rumors are very important, which contribute to the spontaneous organization of people's actions. Mental infection is transmitted from one person to another instantly. Psychology of the crowd, it calls the effect of the law of psychological unity of the crowd (the theory of G. Lebon).

The irrationality of people's behavior in the crowd and high emotional tension are the result of all of its other actions. A person involved in a crowd, in fact, loses personality, personality, becomes a conformist participant, capable of any actions. However, not all people are subject to this. Everything depends on the level of the person's mental and moral maturity.

The study of the psychology of the crowd is hampered by many factors. This is the suddenness with which crowds are formed, and the unpredictability of people's behavior, the instability of the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the crowd, the aggressive nature and emotional tension of people. All these features hinder the conduct of planned studies. Collect data only by interviewing participants in clusters of people or witnesses of events.

The psychology of small groups is much more understandable, since it is easier to study.

Small groups are associations of people, who share common interests and interaction on the basis of common goals. It is on small groups that most empirical research in psychology is conducted. This is due to the fact that most of the life of people goes in small groups (family, company of friends, training and work collectives, neighborhood groups, etc.).

In these groups, individuals are formed, and the qualities of people are manifested. The psychology of relations in a team is studied by science from the point of view of objective signs of small groups, impersonal and depsychologized. The group is considered a psychology as a factor of influence on the individual, his behavior, the peculiarities of his mental states and processes.

Small groups are convenient to study in laboratory experimental conditions. For this, artificial laboratory groups are created with the direct aim of studying their specific properties. To study the psychology of the crowd in a similar way is not possible, which creates the main obstacles and difficulties in the process of investigating this problem.