A crowd is a large group of people that are gathered or considered together. The crowd can be defined by a common goal or a set of emotions, such as a political rally, a sporting event or during looting (this is called a psychological crowd), or it can simply consist of many people who have business with them in a busy area. Sometimes the “mob” can refer to the lowest order of people in general.

Terminology

The term “crowd” is sometimes defined in contrast to other group nouns for collections of people or animals, such as aggregation, audience, group, mass, mob, populous, public, rabble and throng. Public Opinion Analyst Vincent Price compares masses and crowds, saying that “crowds are determined by their common emotional experience, but masses are determined by their interpersonal isolation.”

In human sociology, the term “crowd” simply means “extremely crowded,” as in a busy mall or store. Mobbing has a more negative connotation associated with bullying. In animal behavior, the crowd is a technique in which many individuals of the “gang” type of a larger individual of a different species to drive them away. Mobility behavior is often observed in birds.

Crowd Psychology

Crowd psychology, also known as mob psychology, is a branch of social psychology. Social psychologists have developed several theories to explain how the crowd psychology differs from the people psychology in it. The main theorists of crowd psychology are Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud and Steve Reicher.

This field refers to the behavior and thought processes of both individual members of the crowd and the crowd as a whole. The crowd behavior is strongly affected by the loss of individual responsibility and the sense of the universality of behavior that increases in size.

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