Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.

It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together ... they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief. In the case of human crowds the chief is often nothing more than a ringleader or agitator, but as such he plays a considerable part.

To understand God’s thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

My favorite Asimov works were the 'Foundation' books because the concept, at the time, was crazy, but psycho-history has now turned out to be an actual real thing. You can predict the actions of large groups of people once you understand, for lack of a better way to put it, their way of existing and their prejudices.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.

I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

The integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies.

No one knows what's next, but everybody does it.

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct — and societal repression much more devastating.

I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.