THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter XII
The Crowd Fallacy

Many people are ready to accept the truth that association is the
law of life.  But in consequence of an acceptance of this theory
with only a partial understanding of it, many people to-day are
advocating the life of the crowd.  The words society, crowd, and
group are often used interchangeably for a number of people
together.  One writer says, "The real things are breathed forth
from multitudes ... the real forces to-day are group forces."  Or
we read of "the gregarious or group life," or "man is social
because he is suggestible," or "man is social because he likes to
be with a crowd."  But we do not find group forces in multitudes:
the crowd and the group represent entirely different modes of
association.  Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on
concurrence of emotion rather than thought, or if on the latter,
then on a concurrence produced by becoming aware of similarities,
not by a slow and gradual creating of unity.  It is a crowd emotion
if we all shout "God save the King."  Suggestibility, feeling,
impulse -- this is usually the order in the crowd mind.

  I know a little boy of five who came home from school one day and
said with much impressiveness, "Do you know whose birthday it is
to-morrow?"  "No," said his mother, "whose?"  "Ab'm Lincoln's," was
the reply.  "Who is he?" said the mother.  With a grave face and an
awed voice the child replied, "He freed the slates!" and then
added, "I don't know whether they were the big kind like mine or
the little kind like Nancy's."  But his emotion was apparently as
great, his sentiment as sincere, as if he had understood what
Lincoln had done for his country.  This is a good example of crowd
suggestion because thought was in this case inhibited by contagious
emotion.

  Suggestion is the law of the crowd, interpenetration of the
group.  When we study a crowd we see how quickly B takes A's ideas
and also C and D and E; when we study a group we see that the ideas
of A often arouse in B exactly opposite ones.  Moreover, the crowd
often deadens thought because it wants immediate action, which
means an unthinking unanimity not a genuine collective thought [1].

     1.  A good example of the crowd fallacy is the syndicalist
     theory that the vote should be taken in a meeting of strikers
     not by ballot but by acclamation or show of hands.  The idea
     is that in an open meeting enthusiasm passes from one to
     another and that, therefore, you can thus get the collective
     will which you could not get by every man voting one by one.

The group on the other hand stimulates thought.  There are no
"differences" in the crowd mind.  Each person is swept away and
does not stop to find out his own difference.  In crowds we have
unison, in groups harmony.  We want the single voice but not the
single note;  that is the secret of the group.  The enthusiasm and
unanimity of a mass-meeting may warm an inexperienced heart, but
the experienced know that this unanimity is largely superficial and
is based on the spread of similar ideas, not the unifying of
differences.  A crowd does not distinguish between fervor and
wisdom; a group usually does.  We do not try to be eloquent when we
appear before a board of a commission; we try merely to be
convincing.  Before a group it is self-control, restraint,
discipline which we need, we don't "let ourselves go"; before a
crowd I am sorry to say we usually do.  Many of us nowadays resent
being used as part of a crowd; the moment we hear eloquence we are
on the defensive.  The essential evil of crowds is that they do not
allow choice, and choice is necessary for progress.  A crowd is an
undifferentiated mass; a group is an articulated whole.

  It is often difficult to determine whether a number of people met
together are a crowd or a group (that is, a true society), yet it
is a distinction necessary for us to make if we would understand
their action.  It is not in the least a question of numbers; it is
obvious that according to our present definition a group is not a
small number of people and a crowd a large number.  If someone
cries "Fire," and you and I run to the window, then you and I are
a crowd.  The difference between a group and a crowd is not one of
degree but of kind.  I have seen it stated in a sociological
treatise that in any deliberative assembly there is a tendency for
the wisest thought to prevail.  This assumes that "any deliberative
assembly" is more like a group that a crowd -- a very pleasant
thing to assume!

  Some writers seem to think that the difference between a crowd
and a not-crowd is the difference between organized and
unorganized, and the example is given  of laborers unorganized as
a crowd and of a trade-union as a not-crowd.  But a trade-union can
be and often is a crowd.

  We have distinguished between the crowd and the group; it is also
necessary to distinguish between the crowd and the mob.  Often the
crowd or mass is confused with the mob.  The example given of the
mass or crowd mind are usually a lynching-party, the panic-stricken
audience in a theater fire, the mobs of the French Revolution.  But
all these are very different from a mass of people merely acting
under the same suggestion, so different that we need different
names for them.  We might for the moment call one a crowd and the
other a mob.

  An unfortunate stigma has often attached itself to the crowd mind
because of this tendency to think of the crowd mind as always
exhibiting itself in inferior ways.  Mass enthusiasm, it is true,
may lead to riots, but also it may lead to heroic deeds.  People
talk much of the panic of a crowd, but every soldier knows that men
are brave, too, in a mass.  Students have often studied what they
call the mass mind when it was under the stress of great nervous
strain and at a high pitch of excitement, and then have said the
mass acts thus and so.  It has been thought legitimate to draw
conclusions concerning the nature of the mass mind from an
hysterical mob.  It has been assumed that a crowd was necessarily,
as a crowd, in a condition of hysteria.  It has often been taken
for granted that a crowd _is_ a pathological condition.  And color
has been given to this theory by the fact that we owe much of our
knowledge of the laws of suggestion to pathologists.

  But the laws of the mass can be studied in ordinary collections
of people who are not abnormally excited, who are not subjects for
pathologists.  The laws of the mass as of the mob are, it is true,
the laws of suggestion and imitation, but the mob is such an
extreme case of the mass that is necessary to make some distinction
between them.  Emotion in the crowd as in the mob is intensified by
the consciousness that others are sharing it, but the mob is this
crowd emotion carried to an extreme.  As normal suggestibility is
the law of the mass, so abnormal suggestibility is the law of the
mob.  In abnormal suggestibility the controlling act of the will is
absent, but in normal suggestibility you have the will in control
and using its power of choice over the material offered by
suggestion.  Moreover, it must be remembered that emotional
disturbance is not always the cause of the condition of
suggestibility: the will may lose its ascendancy from other causes
than excitement; suggestibility often comes from exhaustion or
habit.

  The fact is we know little of this subject.  Billy Sunday and the
Salvation Army, political bosses and labor agitators, know how to
handle crowds, but the rest of us can deal with individuals better
than with the mass; we have taken courses in first-aid to the
injured, but we have not yet learned what to do in a street riot or
a financial panic.

  Besides the group and the crowd and the mob, there is also the
herd.  The satisfaction of the gregarious instinct must not be
confused with the emotion of the crowd or the true sense of oneness
in the group.  Some writers draw analogies from the relation of the
individual to the herd to apply to the relation of man to society; 
such analogies lead to false patriotism and wars.  The example of
the wild ox temporarily separated from his herd and rushing back to
the "comfort of its fellowship" has adorned many a different tale. 
The "comfort" of feeling ourselves in the herd has been given as
the counterpart of spiritual communion, but are we seeking the
"comfort" of fellowship or the creative agonies of fellowship?  The
latter we find not in herd life, but in group life.

  Then besides the group, the crowd, the mob, the herd, there are
numbers as mere numbers.  When we are a lot of people with
different purposes we are simply wearied, not stimulated.  At a
bazaar, for instance, far from feeling satisfaction in your fellow-
creatures, you often loathe them.  Here you are not swayed by one
emotion, as in a crowd, nor unified by some intermingling of
thought as in a group.

  It must be understood that I do not wish to make any arbitrary
dictum in regard to distinctions between the crowd and the herd,
the crowd and mere numbers, etc.  I merely wish to point out that
the subject has not yet received sufficient study.  What is it we
feel at the midnight mass of the Madeline?  It is not merely the
one thought which animates all; it is largely the great mass of
people who are feeling the one thought.  But many considerations
and unanswered questions leap to our mind just here.  All this is
an interesting field for the further study and close analysis of
psychologists.

  We must not, however, think from these distinctions that man as
member of a group and man as member of a crowd, as one of a herd or
of a mob or of a mere assemblage, is subject to entirely different
laws which never mingle; there are all the various shadings and
minglings of these which we see in such varied associations as
business corporation, family, committee, political meeting, trade-
union etc.  Our herd traditions show in our group life; there is
something of the crowd in all groups and there is something of the
group in many crowds, as in a legislative assembly.  Only further
study will teach us to distinguish how much herd instinct and how
much group conviction contribute to our ideas and feelings at any
one time and what tendencies are when these clash.  Only further
study will show us how to secure the advantages of the crowd
without suffering from its disadvantages.  We have all felt that
there was much that was valuable in that emotional thrill which
brings us into a vaster realm although not a coordinated realm; we
have all rejoiced in the quickened heart-beat, the sense of
brotherhood, the love of humanity, the renewed courage which have
sometimes come to us when we were with many people.  Perhaps the
ideal group will combine the advantages of the mass and the group
proper: will give us collective thought, the creative will and at
the same time the inspiration for renewed effort and sustained
self-discipline.

  Crowd association has, however, received more study than group
association because as a matter of fact there is at present so much
more of the former than of the latter.  But we need not only a
psychology which looks at us as we are, but a psychology which
points the way to that which we may become.  What our advanced
thinkers are now doing is to evolve this new psychology.  Conscious
evolution means giving less and less place to herd instinct and
more and more to the group imperative.  We are emerging from our
gregarious condition and are now to enter on the rational way of
living by scanning our relations to one another, instead of bluntly
feeling them, and so adjusting them that unimpeded progress on this
higher plane is secured.

  And now that association is increasing so rapidly on every hand,
it is necessary that we see to it that this shall be group
association, not crowd association.  In the business world our
large enterprises are governed by boards, not by one man: one group
(corporation) deals with another group (corporation).  Hospitals,
libraries, colleges, are governed by boards, trustees, faculties. 
We have committees of arbitration, boards of partial management
(labor agreements) composed of representatives of employers and
employed.  Many forms of cooperation are being tried: some one must
analyze the psychological process of the generation of cooperative
activity.  All this means a study of group psychology.  In the
political world there is a growing tendency to put the
administrative part of government more and more into the hands of
commissions.  Moreover, we have not legislatures swayed by oratory
and other forms of mass suggestion, but committee government.  Of
course legislative committees do not try to get the group idea,
they are largely controlled by partisan and financial interests,
but at any rate they are not governed wholly by suggestion.  In the
philanthropic world we no longer deal with individuals: we form a
committee or association to deal with individuals or with groups of
individuals.  The number of associations of every kind for every
purpose increases daily.  Hence we must study the group.
