CROWD ( AS. credo, gerrod, throng; of un known origin), or Molt. In the popular sense, an aggregation of individuals, regardless of their character er the purposes which brought them together. The paychnlogical signification of a crowd is different. The aggregation becomes a crowd only "when the and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their con-dons personality vanishes." A half-dozen individuals gathered together may become a crowd more easily than hundreds assembled aecidentally.
The most distinctive characteristic of a crowd is that the individuals composing it do not think and act as each one would think and act inde pendently. Back of the avowed causes of our acts are min•onscious motives or forces that defy investigation, and these are the mainsprings of crowd activity. They are the common character istics of the race, and it is in these points that people are more alike than in the acquired char acteristics which result from education. It is owing to the fact that these forces which are requisite for crowd or mob activity are the primitive ones, that crowds are incapable of rising above very mediocre intellectual attain ments. This also explains why the crowd de scends in the scale of civilization below the average individuals composing it. If this were not true, it would be impossible to explain the conduct of otherwise respectable people at lynch ings and the degrading forms of torture imposed by them.
The causes which determine the appearance of the characteristics of the crowd are: (1) a sentiment of invincible power; (2) suggestion: and (3) contagion. Through the mere force of numbers, and also through the irresponsibility of the individual of the crowd, a feeling of in vincible power takes possession of him. Nothing
is permitted to stand between him and the realization of his aims. On this account the soldier in battle, acting under a common impulse, is braver and stronger than he would be other wise. By means of suggestion. contagion in the crowd is produced: the individuals are more or less in a hypnotic state; and the individual will and personality disappear in a common purpose or aim.
Crowds are not premeditative: they are im pulsive and mobile. Aroused one minute to acts of generosity and heroism, they may descend the next to acts of extreme violence and torture. They are credulous, believing things wholly in comprehensible to those outside of crowd in tluenee.
Much difference of opinion prevail, concerning the r6le which mob action is to play in the civili zation of the future. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (Eng. trans. London, 1900) , asserts that "while all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappear ing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, time power of the crowd is the only thing that nothing menaces. and of which time prestige is on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds." Professor Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations (New York, 1897), differs widely from this point of view. claiming that "the at tempt to build a fruitful conception of society upon the actions of the crowd under the influence of these imitative suggestions, seems to be crude and unphilosoph ieal in the extreme." See SOCIOLOGY; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.