[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.One part of the question was what specific aspects of the individual psyche were mobilized here.It was widely assumed that powerful, deeper, and more primitive layers of personality were somehow involved, judging from the excesses that often occurred.Another part of the question was how these specific aspects of the individual psyche interacted and were somehow welded together.The French physician Gustave Le Bon (1966) wrote by far the most influential early book about La psychologie des foules, translated as The crowd.He also claimed to be the inventor of the field, but derived most of his ideas 84CHAPTER 4from his immediate predecessors—usually without acknowledging this (van Ginneken, 1992a, pp.119–26).He said masses somehow formed a single being, and were characterized by some kind of mental unity that arose because people quickly adopted each other’s feelings; for instance through contagion, or the hypnotic suggestion exerted by powerful leaders using forceful imagery.After World War I, the British psychologist William McDougall (1920) in turn published a book, The Group Mind, which stirred debates as to what extent one could and should speak of some supraindividual entity emerging in this context.Similar discussions characterized early social psychology, and survive to this day (see Sandelands & St.Clair, 1993).In my opinion, these recurrent discussions derive from an incomplete understanding of the phenomena of nonlinear emergence, which are the key concern of this present book, because the thoughts, feelings, and actions of people may be linked in profoundly different ways.They may be linked in a tight, direct, and relatively unmediated way.This results in the kind of alternative social behavior usually identified as typical collective or mass behavior.But they may also be linked in a loose, indirect, and highly mediated way.That results in the kind of conventional social behavior we are used to in most of ordinary life.Between these two extremes there is a sliding scale.At some point on this scale, a gradual or quantitative difference turns into an essential or qualitative difference; or maybe even at a combination of points, because it is really a combination of such scales that related to various aspects of interaction.We return to this problem in chapter 10, about the metaprinciple of phase transitions.But let us not jump ahead, and first take time to consider various approaches to this enigmatic phenomenon of mass formation.Deindividuation TheoryGreat thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche emphasized that man is the result and expression of some deeper life force.Psychologists and pedagogues have in turn discovered that individual consciousness is not “a given” from the start, but something gradually built.Such views transpire in many psychoanalytical and psychodynamic theories originating from the Germanic world.Sigmund Freud claimed, for instance, that at the outset, the fetus and child experience themselves as symbiotically united with the mother.Through the succession of birth, the interruption of breast feeding, beginning to walk, toilet training, and so on, a gradual separation takes place—from the mother, the parents, the caretakers.At the same time, there is the growing awareness of an outside world.Carl Jung even claimed that we have a “collective unconsciousness” in common, and that growth and edu-FORMATION OF SYNERGY IN CROWDS85cation imply some kind of individuation.Such authors also noted that upon complete submersion into a collective, the individual experiences a kind of“oceanic feeling”: the pleasurable elimination of the painful separation from one’s closest environment.When the Nazi regime rose to power, many German, Austrian, and other psychologists and sociologists fled to the United States, and contributed to the further rise of an empirical social psychology.This led to studies on the effects of authority, conformity, and anonymity on group dynamics.Think of the classical experiments by Kurt Lewin and Solomon Asch, and later by Stanley Milgram and others (for an overview, see Cartwright & Zander (1959), Lindzey & Aronson (1954), Sahakian (1982)).It was in this context that Leon Festinger (1957) (along with Pepitone & Newcomb) proposed the term deindividuation, to indicate the complete merger of an individual with a group or crowd or mass, which led to a loss of restraint.Others contributed to the further elaboration of this notion.One of the most elaborate and most influential discussions of this notion was the essay, “The Human Choice—‘Individuation, Reason and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse and Chaos,” which social psychologist, Philip Zimbardo (1969), presented to the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation.It referred back to the contrast between chaos and order, which had already been noted by the ancient Greeks, characterized by Dionysus and Apollo.It also referred to the large-scale manifestations of social unrest of the 1960s, ranging from students revolts, civil disobedience, and race riots, to death squads and other excesses.It proposed a better understanding of certain excesses by a further elaboration of the notion of deindividuation; or rather the conceptual scheme of deindividuation.Zimbardo undertook to link a whole range of psychological factors, which had earlier been identified in laboratory experiments and field research about individuals and groups.I sum them up here in some detail to give the reader an impression of the possible strengths and weaknesses of this conceptual scheme.In order to understand what was going on in crowds, Zimbardo said that one had to spell out what was specific about them in three successive steps: the input, the psychological processing, and the output in those situations [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]