The Psychology of Crowds

Not too long ago, my wife and I visited the United States to reconnect with family and old friends. While there, I picked up a copy of Gustave Le Bon‘s Psychologie des foules (Psychology of Crowds). Le Bon was and remains a controversial figure for his racist views, as well as his negative attitude toward how individuals behave in groups. I would be remiss not to read him, however, as I hope to develop my “metaphysics of the audience”, which begins from my conception that an audience hinges on notions of collective intentionality that can be partially traced back to Le Bon. Of course, his contemporary Émile Durkheim is the far better-known ancestor to the works of thinkers today like Margaret Gilbert. Yet, Durkheim cited Le Bon in his dissertation; Le Bon’s spectre thus haunts any discussion of the audience as a form of collective.

The Psychology of Crowds may also be useful to think further about something that has been bothering me for a while, namely, how is it that humanity has historically excelled at raising up wise individuals, but far less successful at raising up wise collectives? What I mean is: why, as a collective and an individual mature, does reductionist thinking seem to usually come to characterize the reasoning of the matured group, but nuanced thinking that of the matured person? So to speak, what causes a crowd to resist the testament of their own experience and the advice of expertise, to become proud and frantic, willing to resort to violence against others in pursuit of implausible goals, but a person to accept their own limits, thereby becoming humbler, calmer and more willing to listen and collaborate with others to achieve plausible outcomes?

This is something I have been wondering about ever since reading Averroes (Ibn Rushd)’s sociology of audiences. Students of Averroes know that of all the various differences between audiences that he diagnoses, a key difference exists between those who primarily reason in images or rhetoric, versus those who can reason intellectually. Contrary to his sometimes-elitist reputation, Averroes is not saying the former are inherently foolish; he does believe, though, that they are more susceptible to manipulation because they are more given to simplistic reasoning (intellectuals are also manipulable, but this seems of less overt concern for Averroes). I am also increasingly worried about answering this question as disinformation grips the world, given that its rampant success seems to hinge in large part on what some journalists and political scientists have described as “tribal epistemology” and “political Manichaeanism”.

I may also have a biased view as a so-called Xennial, and an American one to boot. I came of age in the Nineties, following the end of the Cold War and during the height of American power. Americans in my cohort were very much taught one or another version of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, according to which evidence-based reasonableness and democratic consensus-building, in which disagreement did not equate existential danger but instead a pathway toward mutual flourishing, would be the status quo going forward. Arguably, not only was the Golden Age of my youth anything but for most other societies at the time — especially the post-Soviets, who were suffering through semi-anarchy — but it was also an exception to the rule in the history of the quality of public reasoning. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that humanity has recently given ourselves over to cognitive and emotional extremism, and that we are now revelling in a self-destructive bliss of un-thinking expressed as trolling, wilful unfairness and dichotomous categorizing that sooner or later must result in war.

In raising this question, I am making certain philosophical assumptions. One of these is that collectives really do exist. Many would say they really do not, e.g., when people use the first-person plural “We”, they just mean it as an ellipsis for “you and I” and not as a reference to some other kind of entity shared by, or distributed among, individuals.

Another assumption I am making is that collectives can be said to mature like an individual. Thinkers who advocate for concepts like “institutional memory” could perhaps be said to agree with this claim, but it is also possible that institutions as such do not mature, but each cohort of workers within an institution trains their successor, and may also put in place ever-more sophisticated rules and procedures for their successors to utilize.

A related assumption is that collectives, to whatever extent they can be said to exist, are not maturing. Steve Pinker has famously argued that our species is becoming less violent, and that this change is occurring in ways which would suggest greater rather than diminished nuanced thinking at the collective level. Which leads me to my final assumption, namely, that “maturity” connotes “wisdom”, and “wisdom”, in turn, connotes nuanced reasoning and consensus-seeking reasoning – for those familiar with Central Asian culture, this is sort of the aksakal model of wisdom. “Wisdom” can, of course, connote many other things.

Granting all of that, it cannot be denied that public reasoning today is hyper-partisan. The task is thus how to account for it in a way that is both meaningful and durable. Meaningful in the sense of doing more than just pinning the blame on corrupt elites, media echo chambers and the like, although these are for sure very real factors. Durable in the sense of deriving philosophical insights that may have relevance for inevitable future crises in public reasoning, instead of just doing yet another highly contingent analysis of the current political economy, which could very well change in a few years.

I am already going to disappoint you: I do not yet have such a philosophical account. What I do have are some provisional thoughts, and I would be curious to hear feedback about them from you, my audience.

To begin with, short of hypothesizing some kind of Averroistic monopsyche, collectives probably do not have an ontological reality separate from the individuals who participate in them. This means that the quality of a collective depends greatly on the quality of its individuals. Collectives as experienced things, however, as kinds of mental reference points among individuals, do seem to be perceived as being over-and-above those who participate in them. This is one reason why journalism exists, no? The “I” wants and needs to know what the “We” is concerned with, and crucially, how the “We” perceives an issue.

This is simple enough to illustrate from current headlines. If the “I” believes that abortion or gay marriage is good, but the “We” does not, the “I” will for sure feel that a separation between themselves and the “We”. It will be as if the “We” really were a distinct entity, over and above the “I”. If, however, the “I” believes that abortion and gay marriage are bad, and so too does the “We”, all is right in the world. The “I” will experience less distance from the “We”, and perhaps see themselves very much as a distinct part of it.

Secondly, I think it stands to reason that collectives, more than individuals, are susceptible to un-thinking as they mature. To put it simply, if collectives were not seemingly so much more susceptible to un-thinking as they mature, then history would not seem to be full of examples of collectives seemingly losing their minds the older they become, leading to the downfall of empires. I admit that this is a matter of interpretation. For what it is worth, Ibn Khaldun, the great-grandfather of sociology, was convinced that history did indeed testify to the senility of advanced collectives.

To be sure, Ibn Khaldun did not phrase it this way. He is well-known for proposing a cyclical theory of history in which every collective – whether an empire, a republic, a tribe, etc. – starts its existence with a cognitive-emotional robustness that then gradually dissipates until a splinter group emerges with a renewed robustness, thereby spinning the wheel. This dissipation was outwardly manifested as decadence and egotism, but inwardly it was really a fraying of the collective’s ability to build consensus and coordinate effectively.

Now, where Ibn Khaldun saw the robustness as a tight interpersonal bonding with single-minded discipline and the dissipation as a moral-cultural laxness, I have a suspicion that matters may actually be somewhat the inverse: when a collective starts, it has a sophisticated worldview full of nuance and willingness to consider other viewpoints, but as it declines, the worldview descends into black-and-white thinking, resentment, paranoia, and adversarialness. It is this deteriorated worldview that is then exploited by power-hungry individuals for short-term personal gain.

It bears repeating that my viewpoint may be a product of Xennial bias, as for me the collective at stake, whether my homeland or humanity as a whole, in some sense started with the emergence of my own first-person perspective. The human mind has a natural tendency toward nostalgia if for no other reason than history always begins with the emergence of the self. After all, are we not amazed, and sometimes even perturbed, to discover that our parents had lives before our own? And since history for me began more or less in 1991, around the time I began to have real consciousness, I experienced what hindsight now understands to have been the waning days of when meaningful disagreement and political consensus between liberals and conservatives was possible in the United States.

Yes, there was already partisanship at the time, and no, this is not to say that I agree with the neo-liberal status quo that was the prevailing framework of consensus back then. But there is a large scholarly consensus that Newt Gingrich’s rise to prominence within the Republican Party was an historical turning point with respect to polarization.

So, if it is true that collectives have difficulties becoming wise, and if I my inversion of Ibn Khaldun is justified, we have only an outline. Let us take up Le Bon’s mantle here, for what is needed is a postulated mechanism of sorts, some kind of process within, or attribute of, collectives that seems to perennially lead them to the grave of un-thinking. Perhaps there is not one cause, but several. If we can identify the cause or causes, then perhaps what has heretofore been perennial can, going forward, cease be inexorable.

Some possible accounts come to my mind:

(A) Efficiency

The reductionist tendency of a collective may be the result of a kind of heuristic mechanism. In other words, it is ultimately more efficient to organize the collective’s member-individuals through black-and-white thinking, precisely because the member-individuals need to coordinate to resolve problems but do not have the time and resources to consult each other directly, one-by-one and one-to-one. The simpler and more binary the categories, then, the easier it is to coordinate — even if those categories, by being so simplistic and binary, also dramatically increase the risk of being inaccurate, thereby dramatically increasing the risk that the coordination ends up solving little, or even making matters worse.

This account makes sense if the collective is sufficiently large that the member-individuals are more or less anonymous to each other. However, it does not make sense in the case of smaller collectives. The Salem Witch Trials, for example, occurred in a community wherein accuser and accused knew each other on a first-name basis, and yet extreme thinking ran amok — unless, again, there are other mechanisms at work in the lack of wisdom among crowds that supplement or override this one.

(B) Inability to delay gratification

The reductionist tendency may be the result of being unable to delay gratification beyond the individual. It recently occurred to me that much of human reasoning is delaying gratification not only at a strategic level, e.g., suffering financial insecurity in pursuit of an academic degree that may reward greater psychological and financial well-being later, but also at a tactical level, e.g., instead of rushing to judgment about a person’s action, one forestalls judgment to understand that person’s motivation, and one is rewarded in doing so by not instigating destructive conflict if it can be avoided. It is simply very difficult, if not impossible, to organize the delay of gratification at such a minute level in a group or crowd, as there is no common neurology and single master viewpoint managing that neurology that then experiences a reward from delaying its gratification.

For me, this account is intriguing. It raises important questions about the nature of collectivity, reasoning, individual identity and expertise. For example, according to this logic, an expert is one who cultivates specialization in an intellectual or practical activity precisely because they experience “micro” delaying of gratification as a reward in-itself.

However, if there is a key problem in this account, it lies in the implication that collectivity is something distributed among and between member-individuals. This is a problem because people do not invariably experience collectives as things distributed and shared; as I argued earlier, they tend to also experience collectives as entities in their own rights. In other words, sometimes when the “We” is invoked, it is as an ellipsis for “You and I”, but other times, it is to refer to a third thing distinct from you and I in which we either both participate in, and/or through reference to which we coordinate our own actions, attitudes and beliefs.

(C) Competitive (dis-)advantage

The reductionist tendency may be the result of competition. An individual is rewarded by cultivating a more nuanced worldview when competing with other individuals, in that they become better equipped to identify more genuine potential partners, as well as to save energy by accurately identifying genuine non-threats. A collective, by contrast, is punished for sustaining a nuanced worldview when competing with other collectives.

What do I mean by “punished”? It is difficult for a collective to identify potential partner collectives because one empire, republic or tribe cannot just walk up and shake the hand of another empire, republic or tribe. Instead, one collective is initially confronted by individuals from another collective in their capacity as representatives of that other. This introduces an element of epistemological hazard, for it is risky to assume justified true belief about the true character and intentions of the collective that the individual represents solely on the basis of the individual themselves. It is therefore more effective to automatically treat the other collective as a threat pursuant to meeting more individuals that represent them.

The catch here is that individuals are also individuals. In peace and conflict studies, there is a noted tendency for individuals from two rival demographics who have frequent interaction with each other to think of each other as “exceptions”: “All Palestinians are terrorists, except Mahmoud, he’s a mensch,” or “All Israelis are colonizers, except Shlomo, he’s a sadeeq.” Unfortunately, sooner or later it is discovered that Mahmoud supports suicide bombers and Schlomo supports the military occupation, causing all manner of shock, disappointment and even horror.

This discrepancy could point to something important. Fortunately, perceptual differentiation of the rival collective into individuals can and does happen, and it comes about precisely as a result of the gradual difficulties that arise as the “We” tries to overcome the “Them” in their mutual competition. Unfortunately, this differentiation occurs slower than the competition, and it is overly reliant on individual-to-individual interactions that are all the more slower to unfold. In theory, there can build a critical mass of such interactions between “I”’s, but the “We”’s just have much more momentum. In other words, without concerted effort by a large number of “I”’s to course correct, the “We” is literally racing to stupidity.

I am not so in favor of this account. While an interesting re-reading of Carl Schmitt’s concept of enmity, it begs many questions. For example, who is the subject in a collective. That is to say, precisely who within one collective is perceiving a rival collective as a threat? If an individual, who do they have such authority? If not an individual, by what mechanism do the members of the group or crowd come to share this perception of danger — and should subjectivity be ascribed to those mechanisms?

This account also inherently favors imperialism. Simply put, “We”’s left to their own devices are largely incapable of becoming wise because they simply cannot break out of the paradigm of competition. Even when there is no actual competitor around, they are geared to compete, and so they will conjure up an enemy, whether an abstract concept, e.g., “The War on Drugs”, or a minority, e.g., the Jews, the Armenians, the Kulaks, etc. The only way a “We” can be made wise, especially if it is up against a concrete rival “We” and not just an imagined adversary, is for a tougher third-party “We” to come along, smash them to bits, and re-organize them into a larger “We”. This is essentially what the Arab Muslims did, first within the Peninsula, then to the Byzantines, the Sassanids, the Visigoths, and more.

(D) Cohesion utility

Le Bon suggests that the reductionist tendency is inherent to the very being of a collective. He discusses several attributes of crowds, most notably violence, and I can agree with him there, as reductionism is certainly a kind of violence. With respect to possible causes of the violence, Le Bon specifically identifies two culprits: an anonymity mechanism that facilitates their coordination and cohesion, and inherited disposition.

The one acts on the other. Anonymity hypnotizes an individual and causes them to merge with their fellows, thereby enabling efficient coordination between them. What the resulting monster concretely does depends on its genealogy, both in the genetic and historical-cultural sense (legends and founders of religions are especially key). Hence, a collective will be violent, but the manner of their violence, and toward which ends that violence is deployed, will differ depending on their background.

This account does have to its merit a resolution to the moral problem I raised at the outset of this blog post, although the resolution is a terrible one. A collective engages the world in ways that are not only fundamentally irrational, but also irrational to the point of being violent and unfair — that is to say, collectives are violent and unfair in their very nature, precisely because being so facilitates their cohesion. There is a sort of inverse relationship between wisdom and strength: the less wise the “We” becomes, the stronger it becomes.

Let us dig a bit deeper into what Le Bon may be suggesting here, for it is intriguing. For sure, individuals are also deeply irrational; I hesitate to say fundamentally so, but there is no denying we are not the rational self-actualizing agents touted by contemporary neo-liberal ideology. However, while you and I may see things differently because we have partial perspectives, we do not just default to thinking in stark terms of “Me” versus “You” and everything that “I” do and believe is justified and everything “You” do is not. Such reasoning smacks of double standards, if not psychological ill-health. A friendship, business partnership or marriage must eventually deteriorate under the weight of such unfair reasoning. This poison, though, is the elixir of life to groups or crowds.

I find this account difficult to accept on the grounds that all interpersonal relationships are collectives, even if there are only two people involved. For example, when two people fall in love and marry, they will refer to their marriage as though it were a distinct entity, saying about themselves, “We want to raise our child according to our values,” or “We want to own a house in the suburbs,” and so on. Can a married couple as a married couple act irrational? For sure, but there is a lot of psychological evident to show that long-term marriage actually sharpens and sustains cognition, while smoothing out difficult emotions. In other words, marriages can, and often do, grow wiser as they mature.

It is true that Le Bon clearly has in mind mobs, and hence collectives both more concrete and larger than a married couple or Isocrates alone with himself. However, my suspicion is that neither concreteness nor quantity lead to a real difference in quality in this case. That is because there is another difficulty for Le Bon: human reasoning itself may be predicated on collectivity.

In a kind of Cartesian moment, reflecting on what happens when he deliberated with himself, the ancient philosopher Isocrates noticed that “the same arguments which we use in persuading others when we speak in public, we employ also when we deliberate in our own thoughts.” I take this to mean that human reason schematically presumes the presence of an interlocutor, even if there is no concrete interlocutor and one is alone with oneself. Moreover, reasoning is seen as a collaborative effort between interlocutors – again, even if one of those interlocutors is not literally real. Collaboration requires mutual focus and coordination; it requires a “We”, if not always explicitly or consciously.

More recently, the cognitive psychologist Michael Tomasello has been performing experimental research that may bear out Isocrates’ observation. Tomasello argues that collectivity may actually be the evolutionary foundation for reasoning: the abilities to imagine roles and take on a third-person perspective, or even an impersonal “view from nowhere”, is an outgrowth of humanity’s ability to take a plural first-person perspective.  Imagine an ancient hunting party in the wilderness thinking about not only their individual functions within the group, but also anticipating the actions of their prey. Humanity’s ability to perceive and engage the world not only in terms of “I”, but also in terms of “We”, is thus our salvation, not our destruction.

It follows that what is bad for a friendship, a business partnership, a marriage should be bad for any kind of collective, whether an audience, a religious community, a nation, even if the negative effects may be delayed given the larger numbers involved. And we do, in fact, see that collectives are sooner or later undermined by toxicity, as in the case of the Soviet Union. Communism cultivated a paranoid and dichotomous worldview so extreme that a critical mass of Soviet citizens became opposed to it. They simply could no longer suffer the gaslighting of propaganda and the never-ending irrationality of the authorities.

So, with all the foregoing, where do we stand with respect to devising a philosophical account of why collectives become un-wise as they mature? I am not fully persuaded by, or fully dissuaded from, any of these four accounts; I see possibilities in each of them. There may be yet other accounts, as well. I would be curious to hear your thoughts. You can reach me via Phlexible Philosophy, or leave a comment on my blog.