Propaganda

The analysis of collective behavior emerged from concerns about violence and bombings that took place in Paris at the end of the 19th century. Gustave Le Bon, a French intellectual, was alarmed by these attacks, and he began to study the psychology of crowds in an attempt to analyze what he termed the mass mind. Unlike many of his liberal contemporaries, Le Bon did not assume that people were inherently rational beings, and he wanted to find ways to subdue the mass mind. His book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), was the result of that research. He regarded the crowd as a lower life form driven by irrational impulses and theorized that gatherings of people often generated a contagion of passions that dissolved the boundaries of self. Le Bon also found that the imagination of crowds was particularly susceptible to images. For Le Bon, the crowd mind was incapable of thought and instead experienced emotions, urges, and a flood of images.

Graham Wallas, an English social psychologist, and Wilfred Trotter, an English author, were inspired by Le Bon’s work. It was from these three authors that the school of social psychology emerged. Trotter published a text in 1916 entitled Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War and coined the concept of the

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