Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) was a French physician and social psychologist whose writing on crowds shaped early theories of collective behavior and influenced later thinkers.

Crowd psychology: The study of how people think and behave in crowds. Le Bon helped establish crowd psychology as a distinct field of inquiry.
Deindividuation: A reduction in self-awareness and personal restraint that can occur in group settings. Le Bon argued that anonymity within a crowd weakens individuals’ sense of personal responsibility.
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: An 1895 book by Gustave Le Bon arguing that crowds develop a distinctive collective psychology. This is Le Bon’s best-known statement of his theory of crowds.
Sigmund Freud: An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and developed theories of unconscious mental life. Freud directly engaged Le Bon’s account of crowds in his analysis of group psychology.
Social identity theory: A theory explaining how group membership shapes identity, perception, and behavior. It argues that crowd members often act through shared identities rather than losing individual judgment.
Collective behavior: Unstructured group action that emerges when people respond to shared situations. His work offered an early account of how group settings can alter individual conduct.
Emotional contagion: The spread of emotional states among people through perception and interaction. It captures the rapid transmission of feelings that Le Bon described in crowds.
Paris Commune: A revolutionary government that ruled Paris from March to May 1871. The Commune formed part of the political turmoil that shaped late nineteenth-century fears about mass movements.
Wilfred Trotter: An English surgeon and social thinker who explained human group behavior through the herd instinct. Trotter developed a competing biological account of the group tendencies Le Bon described.
Rational choice theory: An approach that explains action as the selection of means to achieve preferred outcomes. It contrasts with Le Bon’s emphasis on unconscious forces and diminished rationality in crowds.

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