Mob Mentality

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Three years ago, a crowd of eager and oblivious Wal-Mart customers waited outside their local Wal-Mart on Black Friday—a feeling of egocentricity and craze radiated from the enormous mob. After the doors had been opened, and shoppers had shopped, a Wal-Mart employee was found dead—trampled by hundreds and thousands of ignorant consumers. The tragic story of this innocent Wal-Mart employee is one of the many modern examples of mob mentality, an essential concept of crowd psychology. Charles Mackay, Gustave Le Bon, and Sigmund Freud, the most prominent crowd psychologists, have explored various causes and effects of the mentality of a mob, and modern authors have claims about mob mentality and its productivity in the current world. Mob mentality is the varying behavior of humans when in a large group, with intellectual weakness, the lack of emotional restraint, and the inclination to take emotional expression to extreme actions—usually resulting in rash and reckless decisions and outcomes. Although personal thoughts and feelings contribute to the crowd’s rash actions in a mob, it is primarily because of innate human nature and the elimination of individual thought that people become irrational and of a savage nature when in crowds and become less mentally and emotionally able, submitting to various contagions in the crowd.

People that are members of mobs act mentally and emotionally unrestrained because of inevitable human nature to revert to savage ways. As humans evolve with the rapidly modernizing society today, our basic needs change. Going back to the time of the agricultural revolutions, before any sign of society appeared at all, humans maintained good morality—until basic needs were not met. At this time, basic needs were p...

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...ille: Trader’s Press, 1994. Print.

Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960. Print.

Mackay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and the Madness of Crowds. New York: Prometheus Books, 2001. Print.

Regenold, Stephen. “The Psychology of Crowds.” Presentations 18.8 (Aug. 2004): 20-26. ProQuest Research Library. Web. 25 Jan. 2012.

Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Print.

Van Ginneken, Jaap. “The Killing of the Father: The Background of Freud’s Group Psychology.” Political Psychology 5.3 (Sep. 1984): 391-414. JSTOR. Web. 25 Jan. 2012.

Whyte, Glen. “Groupthink Reconsidered.” The Academy of Management Review 14.1 (Jan. 1989): 40-56. JSTOR. Web. 25 Jan. 2012.

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