Similarly, around the same age, my best friend was very smart but also incredibly sarcastic. Sarcastic comments rolled off his tongue in the same way that water pours from a fountain. Unfortunately, through unconscious imitation, I picked up this behavior from him, which ended up being an unpleasant character trait. Some years later, I made an effort to eliminate it.
While Seneca spoke about the dangers of crowds and how habits are contagious, today we talk about things “going viral” on social media, which has become our modern-day locus of crowd behavior. If Seneca was right about the dangers of crowds and how they can adversely affect our mental well-being, perhaps we should be more careful about going online. Hypnotic images, raw emotions, and rage often seem to cascade through online networks and take on a life of their own. With the full-blown development of the Internet, the print era’s more serious journalism largely went into eclipse. Unfortunately, the online reporting that has replaced it is often designed to cause outrage, get clicks, and go viral. This cannot possibly be good for us as individuals or as a society.
Back in the 1800s, the social psychologists Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) and Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) initiated the study of crowd psychology, which has since become a significant field. Tarde and Le Bon introduced the idea of herd mentality, also known as mob mentality, which Seneca had written about two thousand years earlier. Scientific studies have shown how people are naturally prone to imitate the behavior of others, both in the real, physical world and online.7
But scientific studies aside, any careful observer can see how individual behavior can often become governed by herd psychology on social media. One example of this is how groups respond to news stories with outrage even before the facts are fully known. In some ways, “Twitter mobs,” when gripped by an emotional contagion, are no less dangerous than physical mobs. When outrage spreads online, the resulting desire for mob or vigilante justice overthrows the need for due process, which real justice always requires. There are now countless examples of death threats posted publicly online (or privately by email) and people trying to “cancel” the careers of people they feel offended by. Since anyone can get caught up in an emotional contagion, this behavior is not limited to either side of the political spectrum.
In his classic book on herd psychology, The Crowd (1895), Gustave Le Bon noted,
The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself—either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant—in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.8
When the group mind emerges and takes over, he wrote, “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”9
As Gabriel Tarde also noted, the fact that people unconsciously imitate one another accounts, at least in part, for herd behavior and the emergence of the group mind. And as a more recent thinker, Tony D. Sampson, points out, it’s because of the hypnotic power of imitation that emotions and feelings spread virally across digital networks to infect others.10
TAKING A LOOK AT INVISIBLE INFLUENCES
Seneca’s interest in how other people influence us is related to socialization, a term that became popular in the 1940s. Socialization is the process through which people become assimilated to society’s values or to the norms of a smaller subgroup.
Much socialization is intentional and deliberate, like when parents teach their children to be polite, play nice, and follow rules—all important life skills. However, other forms of socialization are more invisible and unconscious: for example, the way people absorb beliefs and behaviors through media, advertising, and peer groups. Because of this, people who study socialization refer to deliberate socialization and unconscious socialization.
If we want to become well-developed human beings, socialization is essential. But how we are socialized can be for good or ill. For example, parents might socialize a child to be honest and fair, but another family might socialize a child to hold racist views. In Seneca’s world, the bloodthirsty crowd he saw at the games, chanting for death and destruction, had been socialized to revel in violence. Put in modern psychological language, as the crowd chanted for death it had become a group mind in the grip of an emotional contagion. Seneca was one of the first to notice how emotions can be contagious, now a scientific field of study. For example, researchers have found that yawning is not only contagious among humans. It’s even contagious across species: dogs and chimpanzees can catch yawns from human beings.11 This kind of contagious imitative behavior must be very deep-seated indeed.
While all of the Stoics believed that false beliefs or opinions cause human suffering, some of them also realized that we absorb those beliefs through training.12 For example, many parents teach their children that money is an unconditional good. But Seneca, who had the most profound psychological insight of all the Stoics, realized that something deeper was happening. We can see this from his repeated use of metaphors about invisible influences, which he applied to human psychology—“invisible infections,” “plagues,” and “contagious habits,” which, when transmitted “without our awareness,” can affect our character. Today, we can now see these descriptions as metaphors for “invisible” or unconscious socialization.13
Psychology has taught us that some emotions, ideas, beliefs, and behaviors can have a “magnetic quality” and be transmitted without conscious awareness. As we’ve also learned from hypnosis, imitation and suggestibility are among the most potent psychological phenomena. Even though imitation and suggestibility work in largely unconscious ways, they are primary factors in making mental states contagious. Psychologists also note that social customs and behaviors are largely adopted through unintentional or unconscious imitation.14
While Seneca was perhaps the first thinker to describe this, his insights are even more relevant today. Through mass media and social media platforms, the influence of crowd psychology and emotional contagion has extended far beyond anything Seneca could have imagined. To make things worse, entire industries like advertising and online media actively attempt to manipulate people’s feelings, beliefs, and behaviors on a mass level. Unfortunately, this is not a half-hearted effort: it’s approached with scientific rigor and based on “measurable results.” Each time we click on a viral link or outrage-inducing headline, someone somewhere—or some machine—is keeping track of that link’s popularity score.
How Seneca would respond to this brave new world strikes me as clear. He would tell us, “Don’t be antisocial, but do take a step back” from anything that resembles crowd psychology or groupthink. Certainly, we should take a huge step back from anything that resembles psychological manipulation. When he said, “Avoid crowds,” Seneca didn’t imply we should avoid people in general. He did mean, though, that we should be on guard about the influences to which we’re exposed. If Seneca could have used our modern terminology, he would have said, “Don’t let your thoughts, or your mental autonomy, be swayed by the hypnotic power of the group mind.” From a Stoic perspective, the only antidote to unconscious social conditioning is to safeguard our autonomy as rational human beings. And to do that, we must engage in critical thinking.