Eureka: Crowds Are Not People, My Friend

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A dense crowd in London in 1908.

We have all been to a church or a concert without merging with the rest of the audience into some sort of hive mind. Likewise, we all know from experience that Internet message boards aren't Borg-like mind-melding machines that multiply users' brain power. So why, then, do we insist on treating crowds, real or virtual, like sentient beings? We've long believed that physical crowds are emotional, irrational and prone to violence. Over the last decade, we've come to think of virtual crowds as sources of wisdom that can't be found in individuals. Both these ideas treat crowds as entities, rather than groups of people — an idea that has its origins in 19th-century sociology, which, according to scientists studying crowd behavior today, is deeply flawed.

Clark McPhail, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and one of the first people to actually document and study how people behave when they come together in large gatherings, doesn't even like to use the word "crowd." It's too weighed down by inaccurate stereotypes. For years, sociologists thought a crowd behaved like a herd of animals: at some point, it reaches a critical mass and the will of the crowd overrides individual intelligence and individual decision making.

But that's not what happens. Groups of people are still made up of people. They can behave in helpful and intelligent ways, or they can behave in dumb and dangerous ways. But in either case, a crowd's behavior depends on what individuals are thinking and how they interact with one another — not some overpowering collective consciousness. "Crowds don't have central nervous systems," McPhail said. And that is true whether the crowds you're talking about are physical or virtual.

Gustave Le Bon was one of the first people to write about crowds as entities separate from the people in them. His 1895 book, "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind," shaped academic discussions of human gatherings for half a century and encouraged 20th-century fascist dictators, including Benito Mussolini, to treat crowds as emotional organisms — something to be manipulated and controlled. (Perhaps a Le Bonian understanding of crowds makes us feel more comfortable about the atrocities of the 20th century.) But "The Crowd" was more a work of philosophy than of science, McPhail told me. Le Bon's ideas were based on armchair analysis of past events, not on carefully documented studies of crowds in action. In the 1960s, sociologists began to study protests and public gatherings, and they realized that the things they believed about crowd behavior didn't align with what took place in the real world.

Take, for example, the effect fear has on a crowd. Common sense — which is to say, the Le Bon-influenced myths you've been steeped in since high school — would suggest that a panicked crowd loses all semblance of rationality, charging madly and trampling anyone who doesn't keep up. But despite individual instances that come to mind — the tragic Who concert in Cincinnati in 1979, say — studies since the early 1980s have shown that groups of people generally don't move as a collective front, and they aren't all crazed with terror, even in terrifying situations. On Sept. 11, for instance, large numbers of people organized themselves into a quick, careful and efficient evacuation of the World Trade Center towers. They knew one another, so they discussed plans, they made decisions, they behaved rationally and independently.

In 1997, McPhail and a team of researchers documented the behavior of individuals and small groups that made up the crowd of 500,000 at a Promise Keepers rally in Washington. The Promise Keepers are an evangelical Christian men's organization, and as such, the event was highly structured, with performers and preachers explicitly asking the audience to do certain things: pray, sing, etc. But at no point during the entire rally were more than 80 percent of the participants doing the same thing simultaneously. Most of the time when the audience acted in unison, less than 55 percent participated.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is science editor at BoingBoing.net and author of "Before the Lights Go Out," on the future of energy production and consumption.

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