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“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather to

“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.” - Carl Jung

mattkevan 5y ago
“The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.” - Terry Pratchett
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Also Pratchett, and mathematically probably more accurate (decreasing rather than increasing with the more people added) - "the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters"
- toxik 5y ago
  Jung's statement is much stronger, more akin to 1/sqrt(N).
ricksunny 5y ago
So I think there’s a lot to this composite phenomenon and I wish it were studied explicitly. (Although I wouldn’t necessarily know), I’m not aware of social science / organizational behavior research that dissects the difference between an individual’s behavior and a group’s behavior that they are a member of. Yes we know about peer pressure and power dynamics (the Milgram experiment), but what are situations when an org will do something that all its constituent individuals would not but for fulfilling their respective unique responsibilities in the organization?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
WalterBright 5y ago
Now, think about the wisdom of a democracy :-)
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  we don't ask the mob as the mob. we get the mob to go into a room one at a time and then ask
interroboink 5y ago
While I do think there's something of value in the idea here, boy do I find that quote unconvincing (: The second sentence essentially says "This is due to the fact that that's how it is." I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  > I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy. No, no, don’t worry. Jung was already dismissed as completely unscientific and not to be taken seriously while alive. Sadly, psychology as a field mostly remains in a dire state and still has to shed part of its let’s generously say less than rigorous past.
WastingMyTime89 5y ago
Of course, I invite readers to treat Carl Jung quotations as having a credibility proportional to the amount of efforts he made during his life to properly prove and establish the facts he was enunciating: not much.
- omginternets 5y ago
  Just because it isn’t science doesn’t mean it isn’t true or interesting.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Not all insights come as ready-for-consumption statistics and prepared-for-you facts wrapped in a nice red bow, nor they always come with numbers and figures attached. Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking.
  - Cpoll 5y ago
    > Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking. That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong. Ironically, you don't need to look farther than psychology's reproducibility crisis to see this in action. Tons of great and interesting insights that came from experience and reflection, that led to some bad studies and are completely unreproducible. In fact, they were so interesting and insightful that most people still think they're true. See: Stanford Prison Experiment, most of the stuff in Kahnemann's book, anything Freud said, Myers-Briggs, etc. You know, making up some shit that sounds good.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed ... except at moving humanity forward regarding morality, understanding of society, politics, history, organization of civic life, philosophy, theater, poetry, arts, a few millenia forward, while spearheading democrachy, historiography and several other things besides, and establishing the whole basis for this "western civilization" thing... >That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong. I think an even more real problem is a lack of knowledge of history, and what exactly those pesky Greeks (and others before and after them) did, combined with a fanboy attitude towards the "scientific process" (as if it emerged wholesale somewhere around the 16th century or so).
polishdude20 5y ago
I wonder if this is a consequence of the shared qualities a large group has. In a large group, there are lots of people with different ideas. The only thing that is the most similar between all of the people are their base animal instincts because we are human. Thus, the base instincts are accentuated in the group.
munificent 5y ago
I intensely dislike the cynicism of this and other similar statements. It's a truism of American culture that any group of people is somehow stupider, meaner, and more hurtful than any of its individual members. Yet our lived daily experience is that often our most rewarding, beneficial, and joyful experiences come when being a member of a group. I mean, we are a group right here and right now in this thread and I assume everyone participating still feels it is a net positive for them to do so. The idea that all groups become bureaucracies, mobs, or totalitarian regimes is this weird extreme perversion of American values. Call it toxic individuality. I think a value-free and more accurate observation is that emergent properties exist: a group can have observed properties that are counter to the intentions of any of its individual members. The aggregation process itself can be dynamic, iterative, and complex in ways that break a simple coupling between invidual intent and total outcome. This can be bad, when otherwise sane reasonable people get riled up in a mob. Or it can be good, when a choir's tone sounds more in key than any of its individual singers. It's highly dependent on both the individual members and the communication structure of the group.
- butwhywhyoh 5y ago
  The quote is likely referencing large in-person groups. I would argue HN is absolutely _not_ a group in any meaningful sense. We are a bunch of individuals sharing individual thoughts asynchronously. We don't act in unison. 4chan, on the other hand... Using the combined tone of a group of singers as a counterexample seems like quite a stretch. Again -- the original quote: "... the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche." He talks specifically about the emerging psyche, not some arbitrary emergent property of a group. Can you name one organization that became MORE ethical / smarter / nicer the larger it got?
  - sergiomattei 5y ago
    I believe it's a group: Hacker News is a community. That we don't act as a hivemind is a result of our contrarian community culture.
- kragen 5y ago

mattkevan 5y ago

“The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.” - Terry Pratchett

lostcolony 5y ago
Also Pratchett, and mathematically probably more accurate (decreasing rather than increasing with the more people added) - "the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters"
toxik 5y ago
Jung's statement is much stronger, more akin to 1/sqrt(N).

ricksunny 5y ago

So I think there’s a lot to this composite phenomenon and I wish it were studied explicitly. (Although I wouldn’t necessarily know), I’m not aware of social science / organizational behavior research that dissects the difference between an individual’s behavior and a group’s behavior that they are a member of. Yes we know about peer pressure and power dynamics (the Milgram experiment), but what are situations when an org will do something that all its constituent individuals would not but for fulfilling their respective unique responsibilities in the organization?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

WalterBright 5y ago

Now, think about the wisdom of a democracy :-)

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
we don't ask the mob as the mob. we get the mob to go into a room one at a time and then ask

interroboink 5y ago

While I do think there's something of value in the idea here, boy do I find that quote unconvincing (: The second sentence essentially says "This is due to the fact that that's how it is." I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy.

WastingMyTime89 5y ago
> I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy. No, no, don’t worry. Jung was already dismissed as completely unscientific and not to be taken seriously while alive. Sadly, psychology as a field mostly remains in a dire state and still has to shed part of its let’s generously say less than rigorous past.

WastingMyTime89 5y ago

Of course, I invite readers to treat Carl Jung quotations as having a credibility proportional to the amount of efforts he made during his life to properly prove and establish the facts he was enunciating: not much.

omginternets 5y ago
Just because it isn’t science doesn’t mean it isn’t true or interesting.
coldtea 5y ago
Not all insights come as ready-for-consumption statistics and prepared-for-you facts wrapped in a nice red bow, nor they always come with numbers and figures attached. Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking.
- Cpoll 5y ago
  > Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking. That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong. Ironically, you don't need to look farther than psychology's reproducibility crisis to see this in action. Tons of great and interesting insights that came from experience and reflection, that led to some bad studies and are completely unreproducible. In fact, they were so interesting and insightful that most people still think they're true. See: Stanford Prison Experiment, most of the stuff in Kahnemann's book, anything Freud said, Myers-Briggs, etc. You know, making up some shit that sounds good.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed ... except at moving humanity forward regarding morality, understanding of society, politics, history, organization of civic life, philosophy, theater, poetry, arts, a few millenia forward, while spearheading democrachy, historiography and several other things besides, and establishing the whole basis for this "western civilization" thing... >That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong. I think an even more real problem is a lack of knowledge of history, and what exactly those pesky Greeks (and others before and after them) did, combined with a fanboy attitude towards the "scientific process" (as if it emerged wholesale somewhere around the 16th century or so).

polishdude20 5y ago

I wonder if this is a consequence of the shared qualities a large group has. In a large group, there are lots of people with different ideas. The only thing that is the most similar between all of the people are their base animal instincts because we are human. Thus, the base instincts are accentuated in the group.

munificent 5y ago

I intensely dislike the cynicism of this and other similar statements. It's a truism of American culture that any group of people is somehow stupider, meaner, and more hurtful than any of its individual members. Yet our lived daily experience is that often our most rewarding, beneficial, and joyful experiences come when being a member of a group. I mean, we are a group right here and right now in this thread and I assume everyone participating still feels it is a net positive for them to do so. The idea that all groups become bureaucracies, mobs, or totalitarian regimes is this weird extreme perversion of American values. Call it toxic individuality. I think a value-free and more accurate observation is that emergent properties exist: a group can have observed properties that are counter to the intentions of any of its individual members. The aggregation process itself can be dynamic, iterative, and complex in ways that break a simple coupling between invidual intent and total outcome. This can be bad, when otherwise sane reasonable people get riled up in a mob. Or it can be good, when a choir's tone sounds more in key than any of its individual singers. It's highly dependent on both the individual members and the communication structure of the group.

butwhywhyoh 5y ago
The quote is likely referencing large in-person groups. I would argue HN is absolutely _not_ a group in any meaningful sense. We are a bunch of individuals sharing individual thoughts asynchronously. We don't act in unison. 4chan, on the other hand... Using the combined tone of a group of singers as a counterexample seems like quite a stretch. Again -- the original quote: "... the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche." He talks specifically about the emerging psyche, not some arbitrary emergent property of a group. Can you name one organization that became MORE ethical / smarter / nicer the larger it got?
- sergiomattei 5y ago
  I believe it's a group: Hacker News is a community. That we don't act as a hivemind is a result of our contrarian community culture.
kragen 5y ago