Group Psychology Quotes

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors.

Social justice is group psychology, it's group rights, it's collectivisim, and it's a negation of individual responsibility, which is what the Bible teaches. Individual responsibility. And of course, social justice leads very quickly to socialism, and ultimately to communism.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

Nothing is so uncertain or unpredictable as the feelings of a crowd.

I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.

That's a very complicated issue [with Donal Trump supporters]. There's things going on with people that we're not privy to, we don't understand. These aren't just a bunch of bad people. That isn't how it works.

The instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals are

I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.

Men are a good deal better collectively than they are individually. Many a man will do that privately which he will denounce in a crowd.

I think we in the Alpha Band, which was a strange group anyway, weren't dealing with any of these issues. They sneaked up on us and took us over, before we know what was going on.

Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.

Crowds create illusions.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

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

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.

Five thousand people in one society might do something, but five thousand societies of one member each would be a holy trouble.

Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray, or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.

The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.