- Psychology
I read Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Although it was written over 100 years ago, it is fascinating how surprisingly applicable it is to modern social media society.
Le Bon analyzes the techniques used by leaders to move crowds, and they operate on mechanisms strikingly similar to modern SNS and marketing. Let me organize the key points simply, using examples.
1. Strong Words (Slogans and Catchphrases)
Crowds are said to be influenced more by intuitive images than by logic. To move them, all you need are “words” that have vague definitions but evoke strong imagery.
Case: Make America Great Again (Donald Trump)
There is no definition of “Great.” Because of this, each member of the crowd substituted their own “ideal past” into this variable. It skipped logical policy debate and wrote directly to the emotional memory.
Case: Yes We Can (Barack Obama)
Obama’s phrase has the same structure. He didn’t discuss the specific specifications of “What” we can do, but kept raising the positive flag of “Can.” For the crowd, perhaps what matters is not feasibility, but the “uplifting feeling” the word brings.
2. Assertion and Repetition
You don’t need evidence to install an idea into a crowd. Only “Affirmation” (Assertion) and “Repetition” are required.
Case: Adolf Hitler
In history, the Nazi regime most notoriously exploited this nature of crowd psychology.
Hitler’s associate Goebbels left behind the saying, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” using this as the core of propaganda.
Allow no logical counterarguments, and simply loop definitive statements. When repeated, the human brain errors out and parses the lie as truth. This perfectly matches the mechanism by which radical misinformation spreads on modern social media.
3. The Collective Mind: Disappearance of Personality
When people become a crowd, they are not merely a sum of individuals but a “single creature (psychological crowd)” with new properties. The following three characteristics emerge:
- Automation (Decline in Intelligence): In a crowd, conscious personality vanishes, and we become “automatons” moved by instinct rather than reason. Intelligence levels out, meaning geniuses and ordinary people alike regress to the level of “savages.”
- Sense of Invincibility and Irresponsibility: The “power of numbers” gives individuals a sense of “invincible power.” Furthermore, anonymity obliterates “responsibility,” breaking the instinctive brakes—like looting and destruction—that reason usually holds in check.
- Extreme Oscillation (Hero or Criminal): Crowds are slaves to external “suggestion” and “impulse,” not logic. Therefore, depending on the stimulus, they can become the most brutal criminals or noble heroes sacrificing their lives for a cause; the swing is extreme.
Watching footage of Trump rallies or past Nazi party congresses, you can feel that overwhelming sense of unity. It feels less like individual judgment and more like the entire venue reacting as one massive system—a truly strange sensation.
Summary
Looking back, we realize that many political and social phenomena operate on similar patterns.
- Vague but strong words
- Assertion without evidence, and repetition
- Contagion of emotion
We always live side-by-side with this nature of “crowd psychology.” That is why, when we see “strong words” flowing through our feed, I feel it is important to stop and think calmly before reflexively reacting.
“What is the real meaning of those words?” “Is there evidence for that assertion?”
Asking ourselves these questions might be the essential mindset to avoid being unwittingly swallowed by the great wave.
