Discuss in light of subsequent research Le Bons view that crowds are intellectually inferior, driven by emotion and instinctual urges, and free from the restraints of civilised life and reason.

Le Bon was a nineteenth century sociologist/philosopher who believed that when people joined large, relatively unstructured social groups, they sometimes engaged in spontaneous and atypical collective behaviour.  The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes (Le Bon, 1960, p.43); this state was later named deindividuation by Festinger et al. (1952).

Contagion theory, developed by Le Bon to explain crowd action, holds that once submerged in a group a collective group mind is put in place of the individuals, effectively, a single mind is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds (Le Bon, 1960, p.44)….(short extract)