Crowd psychology

Crowd psychology studies how people’s thoughts, emotions, and actions change in collective settings. It examines both shared behavior and the influence of social interaction on individuals.

Social contagion: The spread of behaviors, emotions, or ideas through social contact and observation. Explains how actions and feelings can spread rapidly among people gathered together.
Gustave Le Bon: A French social psychologist whose writings on crowds influenced early theories of collective behavior. His account made crowd psychology a distinct subject in late nineteenth-century Europe.
Contagion theory: An account of crowd behavior in which emotions and actions spread through imitation and suggestion. It represents the classic explanation that crowds transmit impulses between members.
Crowd crush: A dangerous compression of people in a dense crowd that can cause injury or death. It demonstrates how crowd danger can arise from density and movement, not only panic.
Crowd management: The planning and coordination of people moving or gathering in shared spaces. Psychological accounts inform policies intended to reduce conflict and protect public safety.
Deindividuation: A reduction in self-awareness and personal accountability that can occur in groups or anonymous settings. Helps explain why crowd settings can weaken ordinary restraints without making behavior uniformly irrational.
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: An 1895 book by Gustave Le Bon proposing that crowds develop a shared, suggestible psychological character. This influential work popularized the idea that crowds transform individual mental life.
Emergent norm theory: A theory that explains collective behavior through norms formed as people interpret uncertain situations together. It replaces automatic contagion with interaction and situational rule-making.
Moral panic: A surge of public concern that portrays a person or group as a threat to social values. It shows how collective emotion can develop through public narratives beyond a physically gathered crowd.
Mass surveillance: The systematic monitoring of populations through data collection and observation. Fears about crowds as threats have helped justify monitoring of public gatherings.

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