by Jon Ronson
“LeBon was from a provincial town in the west of France,” he told me over the telephone. “But he decided he wanted to go to medical school in Paris.”
This was a France so wary of the crowd that in 1853, when LeBon was twelve, Napoleon III commissioned the town planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann to demolish Paris’s twisted medieval streets and build long wide boulevards instead—urban planning as crowd control. It didn’t work. In 1871 Parisian workers rose up in protest against their conditions. They took hostages—local bureaucrats and police officers—who were summarily tried and executed. The government fled to Versailles.
LeBon was a great admirer of the Parisian elite (even though the Parisian elite didn’t seem in the slightest bit interested in him—he was making his living as an ambulance driver at the time), so he was hugely relieved when two months into the revolution the French army stormed the Commune and killed around twenty-five thousand rebels.
The uprising had been traumatizing for LeBon. And in its aftermath he decided to embark upon an intellectual quest. Could he prove scientifically that mass revolutionary movements were just madness? And, if so, could he dream up ways the elite might benefit from managing the insanity? It could be his ticket into the upper echelons of Parisian society because that was exactly the kind of thing an elite liked to hear.
He began his odyssey by spending a number of years among the Anthropological Society of Paris’s huge collection of human skulls. He wanted to demonstrate that aristocrats and businessmen had bigger brains than everybody else and were less likely to succumb to mass hysteria.
“He’d take a skull and fill it with buckshot,” Bob Nye explained to me. “Then he’d count the number of pieces of buckshot in order to determine volume.”
After measuring 287 skulls, LeBon revealed in an 1879 paper, “Anatomical & Mathematical Researches into the Laws of the Variations of Brain Volume & Their Relation to Intelligence,” that the biggest brains did indeed belong to aristocrats and businessmen. He reassured readers who might have been worried that “the body of the Negro is larger than our own” that “their brain is less heavy.” Women’s brains were less heavy too: “Among the Parisians there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.”
He conceded that a few “distinguished women” did exist, but “they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity . . . Consequently, we may neglect them entirely.”
And this, he argued, was why feminism must never be allowed to flourish: “A desire to give them the same education, and to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera. The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women leave the home and take part in our battles; on this day a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear.”
“When I was writing my biography of LeBon,” Bob Nye told me, “he seemed to me the biggest asshole in the whole of creation.”
—
LeBon’s 1879 paper was a disaster. Instead of welcoming him into their ranks, the leading members of the Anthropological Society of Paris mocked him, calling him a misogynist with shoddy scientific methods. “For LeBon, woman is seemingly an accursed being and he predicts abomination and desolation if woman leaves home,” the society’s secretary-general, Charles Letourneau, announced in a speech. “We naturally have all kinds of reservations about this conclusion.”
Stung by the humiliation, LeBon left Paris. He traveled to Arabia. He asked the French Ministry of Public Instruction to fund his trip, proposing to undertake a study of Arabians’ racial characteristics, which would be useful were they ever to “fall under French colonial domination,” but his request was denied and so he paid for it himself.
Over the next decade, he wrote and self-published several books on the neurological inferiority of Arabians, criminals, and exponents of multiculturalism. He was honing his craft. As Bob Nye solicitously put it in his biography of LeBon, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, he was now “concentrating on brevity, using no sources or notes, and writing in a simple and graceful style.” What Bob Nye meant was that there were no more skulls and buckshot, no more “evidence” gathering, just certainty. And it was in this style that, in 1895, he published the book that finally made him famous: The Crowd.
—
It begins with LeBon’s proud announcement that he isn’t part of any recognized scientific society: “To belong to a school is necessarily to espouse its prejudices.” And after that, for three hundred pages, he explains why the crowd was insane. “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct . . . In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious.”
Every simile LeBon uses to describe an individual in a crowd highlights his or her mindlessness. In a crowd we are “microbes” infecting everyone around us, a “grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” We are impulsive, irritable, irrational: “characteristics which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution—in women, savages, and children for instance.”
It is no wonder LeBon identified in women, ethnic groups, and children a universal trait of irritability, if that was the way he talked about them.
—
But The Crowd was more than a polemic. Like Jonah Lehrer, LeBon knew that a popular-science book needed a self-improvement message to become successful. And LeBon had two. His first was that we really didn’t need to worry ourselves about whether mass revolutionary movements like communism and feminism had a moral reason for existing. They didn’t. They were just madness. So it was fine for us to stop worrying about that. And his second message was that a smart orator could, if he knew the tricks, hypnotize the crowd into acquiescence or whip it up to do his bidding. LeBon listed the tricks: “A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.”
—
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind was, on publication, a runaway success. It was translated into twenty-six languages and gave LeBon what he’d always wanted—a place at the heart of Parisian society, a place he immediately abused in a weird way. He hosted a series of lunches—les déjeuners du mercredi—for politicians and prominent society people. He’d sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with, he’d pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking.
All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans. Like Mussolini: “I have read all the work of Gustave LeBon and I don’t know how many times I have reread The Crowd. It is a capital work to which, to this day, I frequently refer.” And Goebbels: “Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he,” wrote Goebbels’s aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.
Given all of this, you’d think LeBon’s work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane. And there’s another explanation. One psychology experiment more than any other has kept his idea alive. It’s the one created in a basement at Stanford University in 1971 by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo.
• �
� •
Zimbardo was a working-class New York City boy, the son of Sicilian immigrants. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1954, he taught psychology at Yale and NYU and Columbia before ending up at Stanford in 1971. Crowd theory—or “de-individuation” as it was by then known—preoccupied Zimbardo so deeply that in 1969 he wrote a kind of prose poem to it: “The ageless life force, the cycle of nature, the blood ties, the tribe, the female principle, the irrational, the impulsive, the anonymous chorus, the vengeful furies.”
Now, at Stanford, with funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, he set about trying to dramatically prove its existence.
—
Zimbardo began by placing a small ad in the local paper: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1–2 weeks beginning August 14.”
After selecting twenty-four applicants, Zimbardo turned the windowless basement of the psychology department into a mock prison, with “cells” and a “solitary confinement room” (a janitor’s closet). He split the participants into two groups. Nine would be “prisoners,” nine “guards,” and the remaining six would be on call. He gave the guards batons and mirrored sunglasses so nobody could see their eyes. He gave himself the role of “superintendent.” The prisoners were stripped and put into smocks. Chains were placed on their feet. They were sent to their “cells.” And it began.
—
The experiment was abandoned six days later. It had, as Zimbardo later explained to a congressional hearing, spiraled violently out of control. Zimbardo’s fiancée, Christina Maslach, had visited the basement and was horrified by what she saw. The guards were strutting around sadistically, screaming at the prisoners to “fuck the floor” and so on. The prisoners were lying in their cells yelling, “I’m burning up inside, dontchya know? I’m all fucked-up inside!”
Maslach furiously confronted her fiancé: “What are you doing to these boys? You’re a stranger to me. The power of the situation has transformed you from the person I thought I knew to this person I don’t know.”
At this, Zimbardo felt like he’d been slapped awake. She was right. The experiment had turned him evil. “I have to end this,” he said to her.
—
“What we saw was frightening,” Zimbardo told the congressional hearing two months later. “In less than a week, human values were suspended and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced. We were horrified because we saw boys treat other boys as if they were despicable animals, taking pleasure in cruelty.”
Zimbardo released a selection of clips from the footage he’d covertly filmed throughout the experiment. In them the guards were seen screaming at the prisoners: “What if I told you to get down on the floor and fuck the floor?” and “You’re smiling, [prisoner] 2093, you get down there and do ten push-ups,” and “You’re Frankenstein. You’re Mrs. Frankenstein. Walk like Frankenstein. Hug her. Tell her you love her.” And so on. As a result, and to this day, Zimbardo’s basement has become for students of social psychology the incarnation of LeBon’s crowd—a place of contagion where good people turned evil. As Zimbardo told the BBC in 2002, “We put good people in an evil place and we saw who won.”
—
But I couldn’t help thinking that the evil actions captured in Zimbardo’s covertly filmed footage looked a bit hammy. Plus, while I knew only too well how a psyche can be mangled by sleep deprivation (I have raised a teething and colicky baby) and by being forced into a windowless room (I once spent an ill-advised week in an inside cabin on the Mediterranean cruise ship MS Westerdam, and I’m sure I too would have repeatedly screamed “I’m all fucked-up inside” had it not been for my freedom to visit the Explorations Café and Vista Lounge whenever I liked), at no point, even on the worst nights, did I turn into someone from the Stanford Prison Experiment. What had really gone on in that basement?
• • •
Nowadays John Mark works as a medical coder for the health care company Kaiser Permanente. But for six days back in 1971 he was one of Zimbardo’s guards. Tracking down the participants hadn’t been an easy task—Zimbardo has never released all of their names—but John Mark has published letters about his memories of the experiment in the Stanford alumni magazine, which was how I discovered him.
“What happens when you tell people you were a guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment?” I asked him over the telephone.
“Everyone assumes I was brutal,” he replied. He sighed. “I hear it all the time. You turn on the TV and they’ll be talking about anything to do with brutality and they’ll drop in ‘as was shown in the Stanford Prison Experiment.’ They were studying it in my daughter’s high school. It really upsets me.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s not true,” he said. “My days as a guard were pretty boring. I just sat around. I was on the day shift. I woke the prisoners up, brought them their meals. The vast majority of the time was just hanging out.” He paused. “If Zimbardo’s conclusion was the true conclusion, wouldn’t it have applied to all the guards?”
Then he said that if I looked closely at Zimbardo’s clips—he wished Zimbardo would release the full footage one day—I’d see that “the only guard who really seemed to lose his mind was Dave Eshelman.”
“Dave Eshelman?” I said.
—
He was right: When you picture the evil guards in Zimbardo’s basement, you’re really picturing one man—Dave Eshelman. He was the man who yelled “Fuck the floor!” and “You’re Frankenstein!” and so on. Social scientists have written papers analyzing Eshelman’s every move in there, including the strange detail that the more brutally he behaved, the more American South his accent sounded. I saw at least one analysis of the experiment where the author seemed to find it perfectly plausible that if a person was overcome by a violent madness he’d involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.
—
Nowadays Dave Eshelman runs a home-loan company in Saratoga, California. I telephoned him to ask how it felt to personify the evil that lies within all of us.
“I think I did a pretty damn good acting job,” he replied.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal, well-balanced, rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad,” he said. “I faked it.”
He explained. The first night was boring. Everyone was just sitting around. “I thought, Someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they’re not getting any results. So I thought I’d get some action going.”
He had just seen the Paul Newman prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in which a sadistic southern prison warden played by Strother Martin persecutes the inmates. So Dave decided to channel him. His sudden southern accent wasn’t some uncontrollable physical transformation—like when Natalie Portman sprouts feathers in Black Swan. He was consciously channeling Strother Martin.
“So you faked it to give Zimbardo a better study?” I asked.
“It was completely deliberate on my part,” he replied. “I planned it. I mapped it out. I carried it through. It was all done for a purpose. I thought I was doing something good at the time.”
—
After I put the phone down, I wondered if Dave had just told me a remarkable thing—something that might change the way the psychology of evil was taught. He might have just debunked the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. And so I sent a transcript of the interview to the crowd psychologists Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam. They’re professors of social psychology—Reicher at St Andrews University and Haslam at the University of Queensland. They’ve spent their careers studying Zimbardo’s work.
They both e-mailed me sounding totally unimpressed by the part I’d thought potentially sensational. “The ‘only acting’ line is a red herring,” Haslam wrote, “because if you are on the
receiving end of brutality it doesn’t matter if the person was acting or not.”
“Acting is not ‘unserious,’” Reicher added. “Even if we are performing, the question remains, ‘Why did we act in a particular way?’”
But, they both wrote, the conversation with Dave Eshelman was indeed “fascinating and important,” as Reicher put it, but for a different reason to the one I’d thought. There was a smoking gun, but it was something I hadn’t noticed.
“The really interesting line,” Haslam wrote, “is I thought I was doing something good at the time. The phrase doing something good is quite critical.”
—
Doing something good. This was the opposite of LeBon’s and Zimbardo’s conclusions. An evil environment hadn’t turned Dave evil. Those hundred thousand people who piled on Justine Sacco hadn’t been infected with evil. “The irony of those people who use contagion as an explanation,” Steve Reicher e-mailed, “is that they saw the TV pictures of the London riots but they didn’t go out and riot themselves. It is never true that everyone helplessly joins in with others in a crowd. The riot police don’t join in with a rioting crowd. Contagion, it appears, is a problem for others.”
Then Reicher told me a story about the only time he ever went to a tennis match. “It was a ‘people’s day’ at Wimbledon, and the hoi polloi were allowed into the show courts. So we were on the number-one court. Three sides were ordinary folk, on the fourth were the members. The game we were watching was fairly boring. So people in the crowd started a Mexican wave. It went round the three ‘popular’ sides of the court and then the posh folk refused to rise. No contagion there! But the rest of the crowd waited just the time it would have taken for the wave to ripple through the fourth side. Time and again this happened, each time the masses—half jocular—urging the members to rise. And eventually they did in a rather embarrassed way. The ensuing cheer could be heard a long way away. Now, on the surface, perhaps, one might talk of contagion. But actually there is a far more interesting story about the limits of influence coinciding with the boundaries between groups, about class and power . . . Something contagion hides rather than elucidates. Even the most violent crowds are never simply an inchoate explosion. There are always patterns, and those patterns always reflect wider belief systems. So the question we have to ask—which ‘contagion’ can’t answer—is, How come people can come together, often spontaneously, often without leadership, and act together in ideologically intelligible ways? If you can answer that, you get a long way toward understanding human sociality. That is why, instead of being an aberration, crowds are so important and so fascinating.”
