Columnist Dan Abernathy.

Courtesy photo

To step into freethinking and rid yourself of mental confinement, you must transcend the boundaries and limitations of social conditioning. With multiple distractions, we have been fed clever menus that break our minds and dampen our spirits to keep us dumbed down and mindlessly obedient.

We must stop and look up. Do not blindly and willingly conform to compliance and run with the mob. We must stay mentally strong, mindfully in the moment and detached from what is being offered if there are any true possibilities of freedom to be found.

Mob mentality is also called herd mentality, by definition, and describes how humans can adopt behaviors and follow trends based on their circle of influence. This appears in many forms, whether it’s through blindly following someone or copying their behavior. It explains how those around them can easily alter one’s point of view.

Mob mentality arises from the natural desire to fit in. However, this often depletes an individual’s personal decision-making skills. It becomes more challenging to evaluate and stand by personal beliefs when they contrast with what others are doing.

We have adapted to the nonsense so much and for so long that we have morphed it with thinking. People do not have much of a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as the conclusions are compatible with the beliefs they have conformed to.

As social creatures, we have a desire to fit in with our group, which sometimes overrides personal and moral beliefs. When in a crowd, individuals may experience deindividuation, a psychological state where they lose their sense of individual identity and personal responsibility.

One of the most bizarre examples of mob mentality is that witnessed during the Salem Witch Trials. An entire population was conditioned to believe that completely innocent victims were witches possessed by the devil. This conclusion arrived without any physical or rational evidence. There was simply a snowball effect once one person claimed to see the devil, claimed a conspiracy of witches, and then accused another woman, or man of being a witch. 

With widespread panic, human beings were lynched without a trial because, by that point, those making the determination were incapable of fair reasoning. They had already been entirely swayed by mob mentality.

Psychologists have been studying all relevant topics relating to mob mentality and surmise that there are three psychological theories to crowd behavior: Contagion Theory, Convergence Theory and Emergent-Norm Theory.

Contagion Theory

Crowds easily become uncontrolled, wild and frenzied. In this state, they can exert a hypnotic impact that results in unreasonable and emotionally charged behavior among the members. For example, with mob mentality, superstitions can evolve from a misconception or rumor between a small group of people and escalate quickly.

Convergence Theory

In this theory, like-minded individuals come together by focusing on a limited number of choices as possibilities and then choose the “correct” answer from said choices. Another example could be a peaceful protest. Violence doesn’t have to be a developing feature but may result if the people want it to be and come together in a crowd to make it so.

Emergent-Norm Theory and The Anonymity of The Internet

In this mentality, like-minded individuals share anonymity and emotions which leads to overall group behavior. The anonymity of the internet allows people the freedom of yielding to mob mentality and those messages exchanged via social media, as they are able to let go of the social restraints that would otherwise hinder them in a face-to-face setting.

Mob mentality is the same thing that motivates a person to share an impassioned social media post in a knee-jerk response to social standards. It’s a yield to perceived group pressures by publicly expressing whatever sentiment is in agreement with the norm. It’s become so easy and happens at the push of a finger so that most people aren’t even aware when they are doing it!

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon, who died in 1931, was a leading French polymath and author of The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which was published in 1895. Le Bon characterized the mental state of members of a mob as unanimous, emotional and intellectually weak. He could have been writing not just about mob mentality, but also the future of social media.

He might have had a looking glass into the future as he could have been describing the mob mentality of people on online platforms. These similar and seemingly anonymous social media addicts are deeply emotional and lacking in skepticism or discipline as they amplify the opinions of others by liking or retweeting.

Sheep mentality, like mob mentality, is the behavior in humans where they flock like sheep subconsciously following the group wave. This is the description of how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, whether offline or online, on an emotional, rather than rational, basis.

Merriam-Webster defines the term “sheep mentality,” as “people who are docile, compliant, or easily influenced.” These are the people who are weak, easily persuaded and tend to follow the crowd, not the freethinking individuals with a strong belief of their own.

Knowing that the majority of people have adopted a sheep mentality in their daily lives, it’s understandable that social media has become their shepherd. Mob, or the herd of sheep mentality is not now, nor has it ever been a good platform to be part of. What we need to focus on is the encouragement of critical thinking, promoting open-mindedness, and teaching people to be aware of their own biases. We need to create an environment where people feel safe to express their opinions and ideas. This alone can prevent group thinking and mob mentality.

We live and continue to have actual being in an organized group of people associated with society. This highly structured system profits from the lack of confidence in the reliability of our motives. We have cleverly installed compliance and self-doubt. To defy and resist this established authority by not complying is the peaceful, rebellious act that will return our freedom of individuality. - dba

You can find more of the unfiltered insight and the Art of Dan Abernathy at www.contributechaos.com.