Crowd Mentality theory

• The theory of crowd mentality has been developed over the last centuries by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud. 
• The theory suggests that ordinary people will act differently in a group than they would alone and this can lead to actions they would individually consider wrong. It suggests that when we are part of a large group or crowd we act more animalistic- crowd mentality has also been referred to as ‘herd psychology’. 
• The theory suggests that when large groups of people act together, individuals in that group no longer feel as responsible for the actions ‘of the group’ and lose many of their inhibitions and can act in a more extreme way than in a smaller group or alone. For example: the London riots saw many people acting in a way contrary to their normal lives because they saw everybody else doing the same. 
• Many people have been recorded to say that they can not entirely remember events that happen when they were acting as part of a crowd and often people are shocked by what they have done after the event and the crowd has dispersed. 

• This theory is heavily linked to the theory of de-individuation which is a concept in social psychology that is generally thought of as the loosening of self-awareness in groups – this theory was created by Phillip Zimbardo in 1969 based on the 1963 obedience experiment by Milgram. 
• The obedience experiment is a famous test in which a group of people were made to press a button that gave an electric shock of increasing voltage to a man in the next room until it killed him (the shocks were not real but the subjects believed they were).