Propaganda

The analysis of collective behavior emerged from concerns about violence and bombings that took place in Paris at the end of the 19th century. Gustave Le Bon, a French intellectual, was alarmed by these attacks, and he began to study the psychology of crowds in an attempt to analyze what he termed the mass mind. Unlike many of his liberal contemporaries, Le Bon did not assume that people were inherently rational beings, and he wanted to find ways to subdue the mass mind. His book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), was the result of that research. He regarded the crowd as a lower life form driven by irrational impulses and theorized that gatherings of people often generated a contagion of passions that dissolved the boundaries of self. Le Bon also found that the imagination of crowds was particularly susceptible to images. For Le Bon, the crowd mind was incapable of thought and instead experienced emotions, urges, and a flood of images.

Graham Wallas, an English social psychologist, and Wilfred Trotter, an English author, were inspired by Le Bon’s work. It was from these three authors that the school of social psychology emerged. Trotter published a text in 1916 entitled Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War and coined the concept of the herd instinct. He presumed that the suggestibility of people in crowds was an extension of the compulsion to conform to the herd.

Wallas published a book titled Human Nature in Politics in 1908 and became a mentor to Walter Lippmann, an American reporter and political commentator. Lippmann was inspired by the work of Freud and Trotter. He theorized that instead of using rationality and empirical data as a guide, most people make decisions based on emotions, preconceptions, and experienced pictures floating around in their heads rather than actual thoughts. He coined the term “stereotype” to describe this flow of mental images. Lippmann identified problems with modern mass society, including the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution and modernity on civic dialogue, the prominence of thinking in terms of clichés and stereotypes, and a public misinformed by the news media. Lippmann was concerned about a public driven by irrational urges that needed to be guided by a rational leader. In the 1920s, Lippmann concluded that the vast quantity of available information had become too complex for the public to interpret, which caused confusion and a heightened sense of alienation. People clung to false claims, and Lippmann blamed the media for this travesty.

Lippman’s main concern was the control of the masses through symbols and images. He advocated for an intellectual elite who would lead institutions and agencies to educate the public on the increasingly complex nature of mass information. Lippmann coined the phrase “manufacture of consent” to define such a situation. These conclusions were not dissimilar from those of Edward Bernays more than a decade later. As the United States entered World War I, Lippmann encouraged Woodrow Wilson to use propaganda as a weapon, and this suggestion materialized in the Committee on Public Information. The focus of the CPI was to support the US in the war and along the home front.