Psychology Problems Advice Info

Question by The cool: What do the following quotes mean and how do they relate to social psychology?
What do the following quotes mean and how do they relate to social psychology:

Quotation # 1
The only certainty about following the crowd is that you will all get there together. (By, Mychal Wynn)

Quotation # 2
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. (By, Virginia Woolf)

Quotation # 3
The crowd gives the leader new strength. (By, Evenius)

Thank you in advance

Best answer:

Answer by Graybeard
Think of all three of those quotes in terms of the celebration that comes after your team wins the Superbowl. At first everyone is having a good time, laughing, singing, hugging. Pretty soon the party spills into the street. By nightfall people are throwing beer bottles at each other, someone is swinging from a lamp-post and pulls it down, and there’s a car upside-down and on fire in the middle of the intersection. “I don’t know how things got so out of hand,” says an on-looker. The police arrive in riot gear and a dozen people are arrested, including a college professor, two nurses, and the owner of a bookstore who got robbed.

Quote1: The crowd will almost certainly be headed in the wrong direction. Only by thinking clearly and independently can you know you are going the right way and doing the right thing. If you follow the crowd, you will not go in the right direction, even though you are all going the same way.

Quote 2: Who turned over the car? Who set it on fire? No one? Everyone? The mob is not a thiking entity and cannot be responsible for its actions, but the members of the mob got caught up in it and are not responsible for the entire mob either. They are hardly even responsible for themselves when they are caught in the mob.

Quote 3: The fool who started rocking the car in the first place would never have done it alone. He would never have touched it if he had not been in the mob. But with the crowd egging him on he started rocking it, then others joined and he was a leader. Before long his confidence was bolstered by the crowd and the joiners. He got his infusion of strength and confidence from having willing followers. Alone, he would have remained a coward and no car would be in danger.

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