Abstract
Mass psychology plays a role in many different phenomena like human stampedes, financial bubbles, fashion trends or political movements. Although of different nature, phenomena driven by mass psychology have a common ground: Individual decision making is replaced by psychological contagion, and facts are replaced by opinions about facts. The aim of the paper is to illustrate how technological and methodological progresses in recent years advance the understanding for mass dynamics. Neurosciences allow for a better understanding of human behavior on the individual level; studies inter alia indicate that human brains are not well-equipped for independent decision making. Moreover, agent-based simulations close the analytic gap between individual decisions and collective outcomes. Simple simulation models for example reveal that the susceptibility of people to certain messages, opinions or emotions is the key factor for large-scale propagation of social phenomena. Results from both fields hence contribute to a better understanding of mass dynamics.
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- 1.
Conspicuous consumption, which is an important driver in saturated markets, heavily relies on these two behavioral traits and many marketing campaigns hence utilize them as a lever for advertising.
- 2.
In a 1996 speech, FED chairman Alan Greenspan coined the term “irrational exuberance” for describing the new economy boom in the 1990s, which like many previous financial bubbles was driven by expectations and opinions and was largely decoupled from economic facts. The “new economy” boom ended with a crash in 2000.
- 3.
Two examples shall be named here: (1) human tendency to herd is not beneficial in many situations; (2) human preferences for fat and sugary nutrition often cause health problems.
- 4.
“Population” here refers to the agent population in an agent-based model.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Linda Pelzmann, Thomas Fenzl, Karin Dobernig and Nina Braschel for their comments. Furthermore I thank several participants of the PED 2012 conference for remarks and discussions which notably improved this paper.
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Brudermann, T. (2014). Mass Psychology Revisited: Insights from Social Psychology, Neuroscience and Simulation. In: Weidmann, U., Kirsch, U., Schreckenberg, M. (eds) Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2012. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02447-9_3
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