theories of crowd behavior.

Contagion Theory

Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist born in 1841, is considered to be the founder of crowd psychology, which explains why people do the things they do in groups. Le Bon's 1895 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, attributed crowd behavior to the 'collective racial unconscious' of the mob overtaking individuals' sense of self and personality and personal responsibility.

According to Le Bon, relieved of individual responsibility, individuals will behave in a more primal fashion. He asserts, 'by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs on the ladder of civilization.' A modern comparison might be the teenager who argues that his own actions of toilet papering the principal's house weren't so bad because everybody else was doing it, too.

In his book, Le Bon also formulated the contagion theory, which argues that crowds cause people to act in a certain way. The theory suggests that crowds exert a sort of hypnotic influence on their members. The hypnotic influence combined with the anonymity of belonging to a large group of people, even