Theory Paper

Though people have been uniting into crowds for ages, the study of such entity as a group started only a century ago and turned out to be a complex and fertile field for research. Today it seems obvious that a group is not simply a collection of individuals but is a formation with its own inner processes, structure and motivation. However, it was a number of works of different social theorist that led to modern conclusions about the nature of a group and its character. Scientists have come to a conclusion that behavior of individuals changes once they are united in a group. Groups do not emerge for nothing. They always have a cause of their appearance: either certain motivation or fulfillment of a task, such as problem solution or decision making. Today group processes are viewed considering various aspects, such as the roles of group members, their communication, their influence on each other, dominance or subordination of certain members, the efficiency of the group in whole. The most considerable contributions into the social theory of group development were made by such sociologists and psychologists as Gustave Le Bon and Floyd Allport, whose views upon the group development were opposite, but nevertheless contributed to the social theory progress.
Gustave Le Bon, a French scientist, introduced the concept of crowd behavior, which become important for the establishment of social theory in the beginning of the twentieth century. Le Bon supported the idea that a crowd is a conglomeration of people, whose behavior differs much from their individual one. United into a group people start thinking differently and form collective mind. The collective mind is formed without any agreement or discussion. People do not decide how they should behave, common in all people psychological processes manifest themselves in a crowd. The ideas and thoughts are spread among people as a contagious disease. “In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest”(Le Bon, p.18). Certainly it concerns rather primitive ideas, therefore, Le Bon considered a group an uncivilized and savage entity. The main causes of such behavior are accounted for deindividuation or as Le Bon (2001) called it “loss of self”. Anonymity relieves people of any responsibility for their deeds, which returns them to stages of primitive behavior when cruelty was a norm of behavior. Being a member of a group a person feels less responsibility for his actions. Coupled with the realization of the power of a whole group, a person has a feeling of omnipotence. Therefore, crowds are often so destructive and powerful.
Le Bon’s theory became the basis for the theory of deindviduation, which started to develop in the 50s years of the twentieth century. However, the theory was slightly changed and instead the anonymity as the primary factor of changed behavior, lack of responsibility and loss of self-control were proposed the most important(Turner & Killian,1972). Taking into account the interdependence of these factors, it is obvious that the theory of deindividuation became the continuation of Le Bon’s theory of psychological crowd. It was exactly the term “psychological crowd” that Le Bon used in his theory, because in his opinion the crowd was united not by its motivation and reasons but by their feelings and emotions, unique for all individuals. As it has already been mentioned, the crowd was regarded by Gustave Le Bon as a primitive and cruel community. Therefore, taking into account that people always belong to different groups, which possess a collective mind, the society is moving towards its decay due to widespread barbarism. “it has been the task of the masses before to bring about the destruction of a worn-out civilization…” (Le Bon, 2001, p.10).
Le Bon applied his theory not only to social processes but to political ones too, as they inevitably depend from the masses. Basing on the phenomenon of a crowd behavior he was sure that people need authoritarian rule as without a lead a mass of people does not know where to move and where to direct its destructive force. So, he was very pessimistic of the socialism as a political system.
“Their bursts of violence are like the tumultuous waves that the tempest rains on the surface of the ocean, but without troubling the serenity of its profounder waters… The Socialists imagine that they will easily carry the masses with them. They are wrong. They will very quickly discover that they will find among the masses, not their allies but their most implacable enemies” (Le Bon, 2009, p. 105).
Despite significant influence of Le Bon’s theory on the development of psychology and its consolidated positions in science, the concept of psychological crowds and collective mind faced criticism from the side of the supporters of the convergence theory. One of them was Floyd Allport, who is considered the founder of experimental social psychology. The convergence theory claims that this is not the crowd that makes people act differently, but these are people that change the behavior of the crowd. Floyd Allport in his article “The Group Fallacy in Relation to Social Science” emphasizes the inconsistency of the theory of the crowd behavior in its inability to find the roots of the changing behavior of people, just describing the process.
Why should the excitability of one crowd express itself in whipping non-church-going farmers, that of another crowd in looting grocery stores, and that of still another in lynching negroes? These questions throw into relief the necessity of delving deeper for our notions of cause than terms which describe the crowd as a whole” (Allport, p.5).
According to Allport people join a particular group because they have common needs and goals, adding to the behavior of the whole crowd. Thus, the group of people bears the characteristics of its members and acts as people want it. So, this approach views the social psychology from an absolutely different perspective. This is not a cruel primitive crowd that rules people, but these are people who channel their activity, lead the crowd and have particular causes of it.
Thus, we see that two leading social theorists of the twentieth century, though examined the same object, adhered to absolutely opposite opinions. Both the theory of crowd behavior and the convergence theory acknowledged the extraordinary role of groups in the development of the society. Le Bon and Allport agreed that a group was the major way of people’s organization and had its own processes and peculiar characteristics.
However, this is the essence of group processes that made these theories oppose each other. It is impossible to claim that one of these theories cannot exist because the science and human experience proved the validity of both of them. Le Bon’s theory was experimentally tested by the leaders of the fascist regime, Hitler and Mussolini. Both of them used his book as a guide in their policy and one cannot say that it had no result. However, the convergence theory also found many supporters and was proved in many experiments conducted by Floyd Allport.
The main controversial points between these two theories are the causes of the behavior of a crowd. The opinions about the emerging aggression in a group are of particular interest. Le Bon contended that people become aggressive in a crowd because they lose the sense of responsibility and feel omnipotence and permissiveness. Allport stood for the origin of aggression outside the group and then brought into it by separate individuals. He also thought that a group, including aggressive one, could express the attitude in the environment.
To conclude, it is impossible to distinguish one theory as a primary and leading but it is necessary to take into account both of them in the study of social psychology.

 
References
Allport, F. H. The Group Fallacy in Relation to Social Science.
Le Bon, G. (2001). The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind. Batoche Books.
Le Bon, G. (2009). The Psychology of Socialism. General Books LLC
Nye, R. A.(1975). The origins of crowd psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the crisis of mass democracy in the third republic. Bervely Hills, CA: Sage.
Perry M., Chase M, Jacob M. C.(2006). Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics, and Society . Wadsworth Publishing.
Turner, R. H., & Killian, L. M. (1972). Collective behavior. (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972