W. F. Ogburn & M. J. Nimkoff - Crowds 英译

On October 30, 1938, thousands of Americans in the New York area were terror-stricken by a radio broadcast describing an invasion from Mars. The presentation was merely a dramatization0 of H. G. Wells’ fantastic novel The War of the Worlds, but it was presented with such stark realism — including reports from fictitious astronomers, governmental officials, and “eye-witnesses” — that many listeners fled their homes and their communities. In London on January 15, 1955, a thick belt of darkness, caused by an accumulation of smoke under an extremely thick layer of cloud, suddenly wrapped itself around the city in the early afternoon. It lasted only ten minutes; but during this time, women screamed in the streets, others fell to their knees on the sidewalks and prayed. Some cried out hysterically that they had gone blind. A man at Croydon groped through in the inky blackness shouting, “The end of the world has come”. These two episodes are at once identified as cases of panic, an extreme type of crowd behavior, which in turn is a variety of collective behavior. In the interests of coherence of treatment and because of limitation of space, this chapter will treat only two related aspects of collective behavior: crowd and publics.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Ordinarily when we think of the crowd, we picture a group of individuals massed in one place; but as the opening illustration of the chapter indicates, physical proximity is not essential to crowd behavior, especially in a society like ours with instruments of mass communication like the newspaper and radio. What is crucial to the understanding of the crowd is the highly emotional responses of individuals when they are released from the restraints that usually inhibit extreme behavior. What releases the customary restraints and leads to crowd behavior?

Crowd emotionality is perhaps best interpreted in terms of heightened suggestibility, that is, the tendency of an individual in a crowd to respond uncritically to the stimuli provided by the other members. The individual learns to make almost automatic responses to the wishes of others, particularly those in authority and those he greatly respects.

From infancy on, he is so dependent upon the judgment of others for direction in his own affairs that he comes to lean heavily on the opinions of others. Moreover, he learns to value highly the esteem in which other persons hold him, and consequently he courts their favor by conforming to their ways and wishes. For these reasons, among others, when he finds himself in a congenial crowd of persons, all of whom are excited, it is natural that he, too, should be affected.

The effect of suggestion is to produce a partial dislocation of consciousness. When we are critical about a matter, we give it close attention, and our whole interest is centered upon it. But when a suggestion is made by someone whom we esteem, our attention is divided, partly on the issue at hand, partly on the person who made the suggestion. The more awesome the source of the suggestion, the greater the degree of dissociation and the greater the amount of automatic behavior.

If the crowd has a leader who is admired, the effect of the suggestion is still further heightened. The situation is illustrated by hypnotism, where the effectiveness of the suggestion depends on the attitude of the subject towards the hypnotist. No one can be hypnotized against his will; and the best results are obtained where close co-operation exists between subject and experimenter. The effect of suggestion should help us to understand the frenzy of a camp meeting led by an evangelist like the late Billy Sunday, or the hysteria of a Nazi mass meeting led by Hitler.

The group factor also influences crowd behavior through the security which an individual feels when he is part of the mass. Individuals are less reluctant to join a lynching party than to commit murder on their own. The explanation would seem to lie partly in the fact that the action seems more defensible when carried out by the group and partly in the fact that individual responsibility is blotted out. The participants remain anonymous and there is no one upon whom the authorities can pin the offence. This condition, in which the group does not identify its members as individuals and which therefore has been called “de-individuation”, leads to reduction of inner restraint and to more expressive behavior.