How times change: In the 110 years between the work of Gustave Le Bon (1895) and James Surowiecki (2005), crowds went from embodying stupidity to being wise. Compare and contrast:
- Le Bon: “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. [T]he crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual.”
- Surowiecki: “[U]nder the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”
Reacting to “the entry of popular masses into political life”, i.e. universal suffrage, Le Bon predicted the arrival of “the era of crowds”. Surowiecki suggests the same thing. But while the former asserts crowds will bring about the downfall of civilization, Surowiecki hails the potential of crowds for solving humanity’s problems.
Of course, it’s trivial to say the world can change significantly in 100 years. But why such a stark difference? How and why should the crowds have changed so much?
It’s not that humanity has psychologically and socially evolved that much in just over a century. Technology isn’t the answer either, though the internet in particular has helped create constructive (as well as destructive) crowds out of strangers. While history between Le Bon and Surowiecki provided many additional examples to support both views, the answer lies in the analysis: The two crowds in question are two different beasts.
What is crowd
In Le Bon’s account, crowds acquire a collective mind, in which people’s individuality dissolves: “In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened.” What people have in common takes over what differentiates them; Le Bon’s crowd reflects the lowest common denominator: “The heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand.” In large part, Le Bon talks about the crowd he knows: a physical collection of individuals. For Le Bon, a crowd is a mob.
Surowiecki is talking about a different crowd. Though he gives no exact definition, his crowd tends to be a large, ad hoc collection of individuals in complex social situations, which, thanks to technological progress, don’t have to be defined by geographic proximity. What’s more, Surowiecki’s crowd works, consciously or not, to solve various problems.
Crowds: Stupid or smart?
Why is Le Bon’s crowd stupid and Surowiecki’s wise? Le Bon ascribes the causes of crowd emergence and stupidity to
- anonymity, which allows an individual to shed his individuality;
- contagion, which makes an individual surrender his interest to that of the collective mind; and
- suggestibility, which makes an individual follow the lead of the collective mind, as if in a state of hypnosis.
Le Bon’s assertions about the characteristics of crowds became accepted wisdom. However, what was once the wisdom of crowd psychology eventually turned to myths: research and evidence show crowds aren’t as emotional, irrational, anonymous, suggestible, or destructive as previously thought.
Surowiecki’s crowd is smart under four conditions:
- Diversity of opinion – Each individual has some information others don’t.
- Independence - Each individual forms his opinion in relative freedom from the influence of others.
- Decentralization - Each individual specializes and draws on local knowledge.
- Aggregation - Something or someone translates all individual opinions into a collective decision, or organizes individual actions into collective outcomes.
Le Bon’s crowds are up to no good (in fact, his ideas influenced the worst authoritarians of the first half of the 20th century). By contrast, the collective intelligence of Surowiecki’s crowd can solve a number of problems:
- Cognition problems, which require individuals to contribute their opinions to come up with a collective definitive, mean, or preferred solution, e.g. prediction markets or multiple choice tasks
- Coordination problems, which require group members to coordinate their behavior with each other, e.g. trade or traffic
- Cooperation problems, which require self-interested individuals to trust each other and work together to solve common issues despite the impulse to free-ride, e.g. paying taxes
Surowiecki’s account of crowds provides for fascinating and entertaining reading. My only issue was with describing crowds as wise or smart. Simply taking dictionary wise means “having experience and knowledge and judiciously applying them”, and smart means “clever, ingenious, quickwitted”. Surowiecki’s collective wisdom amounts to the cumulative effect of individual decisions, or “average judgment of the group as a whole”. These effects or judgments can be efficient, accurate, optimal, or mutually beneficial, but all of these qualities have far to go to wise or smart. Surowiecki’s crowds don’t acquire a collective mind, the way Le Bon’s do. They simply generate positive results, under specific circumstances, from aggregating the crowd members’ individual actions. Often, in pursuit of their self-interest, members of the crowd don’t even know or feel like they’re part of any crowd, which makes calling them so a stretch of imagination.
Crowds and sustainable marketing
What does any of this have to do with marketing or sustainability? First, any discussion of sustainability does, or should, incorporate the discussion of diversity, decentralization, and in(ter)dependence.
More importantly, a smart sustainable business can harness the potential of crowds to its advantage by serving as the mechanism for aggregation of inputs from the members of the crowd. Product development, price-setting, community involvement, capacity utilization, prediction, or innovation are just some of the areas where the crowds can be helpful (do read Surowiecki’s book to generate some concrete ideas for your business). In turn, smart sustainable businesses can cultivate the crowd as a community of support.
What do you think? Does the crowd have a place in sustainable marketing? Have you (your company) worked with crowds to drive business?
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Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, translated from the French “La psychologie des foules”, New York: Macmillan, 1895. (Full text.)
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, New York: Anchor Books, 2005.
