Reading people
The Crowd
How a crowd runs
The Crowd (1895 · Gustave Le Bon) — How a crowd runs.
What actually happened?
Le Bon returns again and again to the September massacres of 1792, when improvised tribunals of Paris citizens put more than a thousand prisoners to death. The men doing it were not thugs. Most were shopkeepers, craftsmen and clerks, mild enough on any ordinary day. When they had finished they emptied the dead men's pockets and handed the valuables in to the committee, considered themselves to have performed a patriotic duty, and afterwards applied to the authorities for recognition. That, he says, is the real horror of crowds. Not bad people gathering to do harm, but ordinary people doing what none of them would have done alone, and believing throughout that they were doing good.
Three laws of the crowd mind
First, intelligence levels downward: a crowd does not perform at the average of its members but near the floor, because only the simplest feelings and slogans travel in it. Second, feeling is contagious, and panic and enthusiasm move far faster than reasoning. Third, anonymity loosens restraint, because a contribution nobody can pick out costs nobody anything.
Buying frenzies, bank runs, pile-ons online. To tell whether a room has gone crowd-shaped, watch whether a reasonable sentence still finds any buyer.
Affirm, repeat, infect
His three moves for handling a crowd. Affirmation: state it flatly, explain nothing, prove nothing. Repetition: say the same sentence until it settles in as though it were a fact. Contagion: once enough people hold it, it spreads on its own and needs no further push. Every successful slogan runs down this line.
Take any advertising line you can still recite. It carried no argument, and you heard it several hundred times.
A crowd takes images, not logic
What acts on a crowd is not the fact but the way it is presented. Crowds are not reached by reasoning, they are reached by pictures, stories and symbols. Statistics delivered to a crowd do nothing; one specific person with a name does the work of ten thousand rows.
An appeal built around one named child raises more than one built on three million out of school. Absurd arithmetically, inevitable psychologically.
Turn it round and use it as a defence
Knowing how a crowd is worked tells you when you are being worked. Three signals: when your anger or enthusiasm arrives at the same moment as everyone else's; when an idea is so simple you want to pass it on without thinking; and when you catch yourself saying that this many people cannot all be wrong.
Any of the three should send you out of the crowd to recompute the thing on your own, slowly.
How do I use it today?
Use it in two directions. When you are communicating, translate the argument into a story and a picture, and accept that repetition does the work that proof will not. When you are deciding, treat everyone thinks so as the exact moment to run your own numbers. Ask periodically whether the view you are holding was calculated or caught.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.
Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian.
In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious.