Minneapolis
When I watched the videos of Renée Good and Alex Pretti being shot by federal agents in Minneapolis, I thought first of the people who loved them—their families, friends, and communities—and of the grief that would ripple outward from their deaths. I also found myself thinking about the agents who fired the shots—their families, friends, and communities as well. I wondered if the agents now feel regret.
As I watched the footage, it seemed clear that, in the moment at hand, the agents were swept up in shared emotions of fear and urgency, and maybe hatred as well, intensified by one another. They were caught in a small but powerful field of shared feeling—a localized form of crowd psychology. This field may well have been part of their training, too.
And as I watched the vigils that followed, honoring Renée and Alex, I recognized another such field at work: people gathered, shaped by shared grief, anger, and resolve. Theirs, too, was a form of crowd psychology, different in spirit but similar in structure. And some of them may also have partaken of another field of shared feeling, namely that of anger and hatred directed toward the federal agents, perceived as enemies.
On this page, I offer Whiteheadian perspectives on crowd psychology: one that seeks to understand how such intensified fields of shared feeling form us, for good or ill, in moments that matter.
- Jay McDaniel
As I watched the footage, it seemed clear that, in the moment at hand, the agents were swept up in shared emotions of fear and urgency, and maybe hatred as well, intensified by one another. They were caught in a small but powerful field of shared feeling—a localized form of crowd psychology. This field may well have been part of their training, too.
And as I watched the vigils that followed, honoring Renée and Alex, I recognized another such field at work: people gathered, shaped by shared grief, anger, and resolve. Theirs, too, was a form of crowd psychology, different in spirit but similar in structure. And some of them may also have partaken of another field of shared feeling, namely that of anger and hatred directed toward the federal agents, perceived as enemies.
On this page, I offer Whiteheadian perspectives on crowd psychology: one that seeks to understand how such intensified fields of shared feeling form us, for good or ill, in moments that matter.
- Jay McDaniel
Mutually Prehended Feelings
In Process and Reality Whitehead writes: “The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion. In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another.”
With this single sentence Whitehead offers a powerful proposal for crowd psychology. In crowds, people can and do feel the feelings of others and conform to those feelings, such that states of passion or emotion become shared. This sympathetic conformation is not accidental to the people involved; it belongs to their very existence—their subjective experience—in the moments at hand. Their existence in that moment is an act of the many becoming one, and the feelings of others are among the “many” that become one in their experience.
What is occurring here is more than imagination or inference about what others might be feeling. It is state-sharing. Emotions circulate, are prehended, and are taken up bodily and affectively before they are interpreted conceptually or judged morally. The states that are shared may be positive, negative, or neutral. They may include fear, anger, panic, humiliation, resentment, joy, courage, tenderness, hope, or exhilaration. They may involve a shared sense of threat or safety, a readiness to act or to submit, a surge of solidarity or a collapse into hostility. Whatever their quality, these shared states are not external pressures acting upon otherwise self-contained individuals; they are ingredients in the very constitution of each person’s experience in that moment.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, individuality is not erased in crowds, but it is reconfigured. Each person remains a distinct occasion of experience, yet each occasion is partly constituted by the feelings of others in its immediate environment. The crowd is not a separate super-organism hovering above individuals, nor merely a collection of isolated psyches influencing one another from the outside. It is a dynamically evolving field of mutually prehended feelings—an intersubjective atmosphere in which experience takes shape. Crowd behavior, on this account, emerges from the most primitive structure of experience itself: our capacity, and our vulnerability, to feel the feelings of others and to conform to them as our own.
This helps explain both the creative and the destructive power of crowds. When the shared emotional field is one of care, courage, or joy, individuals may find themselves capable of generosity, solidarity, and sacrifice that would have been impossible in isolation. When the shared field is saturated with fear, rage, or hatred, individuals may be swept into actions they neither intended nor would later recognize as expressive of their better aims. In either case, what drives crowd behavior is not primarily a loss of reason but the deep, sympathetic conformation of feeling. Crowd psychology, read through Whitehead, is thus not an anomaly or breakdown of human experience, but an intensification of one of its most basic and enduring features: that we become who we are, moment by moment, partly by feeling with others.
- Jay McDaniel
With this single sentence Whitehead offers a powerful proposal for crowd psychology. In crowds, people can and do feel the feelings of others and conform to those feelings, such that states of passion or emotion become shared. This sympathetic conformation is not accidental to the people involved; it belongs to their very existence—their subjective experience—in the moments at hand. Their existence in that moment is an act of the many becoming one, and the feelings of others are among the “many” that become one in their experience.
What is occurring here is more than imagination or inference about what others might be feeling. It is state-sharing. Emotions circulate, are prehended, and are taken up bodily and affectively before they are interpreted conceptually or judged morally. The states that are shared may be positive, negative, or neutral. They may include fear, anger, panic, humiliation, resentment, joy, courage, tenderness, hope, or exhilaration. They may involve a shared sense of threat or safety, a readiness to act or to submit, a surge of solidarity or a collapse into hostility. Whatever their quality, these shared states are not external pressures acting upon otherwise self-contained individuals; they are ingredients in the very constitution of each person’s experience in that moment.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, individuality is not erased in crowds, but it is reconfigured. Each person remains a distinct occasion of experience, yet each occasion is partly constituted by the feelings of others in its immediate environment. The crowd is not a separate super-organism hovering above individuals, nor merely a collection of isolated psyches influencing one another from the outside. It is a dynamically evolving field of mutually prehended feelings—an intersubjective atmosphere in which experience takes shape. Crowd behavior, on this account, emerges from the most primitive structure of experience itself: our capacity, and our vulnerability, to feel the feelings of others and to conform to them as our own.
This helps explain both the creative and the destructive power of crowds. When the shared emotional field is one of care, courage, or joy, individuals may find themselves capable of generosity, solidarity, and sacrifice that would have been impossible in isolation. When the shared field is saturated with fear, rage, or hatred, individuals may be swept into actions they neither intended nor would later recognize as expressive of their better aims. In either case, what drives crowd behavior is not primarily a loss of reason but the deep, sympathetic conformation of feeling. Crowd psychology, read through Whitehead, is thus not an anomaly or breakdown of human experience, but an intensification of one of its most basic and enduring features: that we become who we are, moment by moment, partly by feeling with others.
- Jay McDaniel
Porous Boundaries
Crowds unsettle us because we know, from experience, that who we become together is not always who we are when are alone.
This is not to say that our solitary self is closer to who we really are than our crowd-immersed self. In moments of collective effervescence, we may become more fully ourselves in some way. Sometimes, when we are gathered with others, we are lifted into courage, generosity, and joy. Consider a crowd singing together at a vigil after a tragedy, where strangers hold one another in silence and song; or a nonviolent march in which fear gives way to resolve and mutual care; or a festival where music and dance open us to a shared delight that none of us could have generated by ourselves. In such moments, we feel enlarged rather than diminished, more responsible rather than less.
At other times, however, we humans can be, an are, pulled into cruelty, fear, and destruction. Consider a lynch mob, a pogrom, or a riot fueled by rage and humiliation, where ordinary moral inhibitions collapse; or a wartime frenzy in which killing feels justified by belonging; or a crowd whipped into hatred by slogans that reduce the world to enemies and threats. Here, too, we are carried beyond ourselves—but into a narrowed and brutalized form of togetherness that later feels foreign and shameful.
Collective frenzy at competitive sporting events occupies a more ambiguous space between these two poles. On the one hand, we feel at one with our team and with fellow fans, sharing joy, hope, and identity. On the other hand, at least for the duration of the contest, we may momentarily turn the other team—and sometimes its supporters—into an enemy to be defeated. The intensity is usually contained by rules and ritual, but it reveals how easily solidarity can slide toward exclusion, and how thin the line can be between life-giving unity and antagonistic belonging.
Truth be told, even allegedly positive forms of crowd psychology often carry within them a felt intensity that unfolds within a we–they distinction. In acts of resistance, for example, we may be happy in the moment because we are absorbed in an internalized in-group love and joy, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Our “collective effervescence,” to use Durkheim’s phrase, rests not only on shared hope but also on the presence of others whom we are resisting and whom we hope will, in some sense, be overcome.
Crowd psychology has long oscillated between suspicion and hope, torn between seeing crowds as dangerous mobs or as sources of solidarity and renewal—or, more unsettlingly, as both at once. And even when we are alone, we are in a certain sense en-crowded. The people whom we love or fear, the natural world, the archetypes and images of the collective whole, are within us even as more than us.
A Whiteheadian perspective helps us hold these truths together without collapsing one into the other.
It does so by shifting our focus away from crowds as entities with minds of their own and toward how we ourselves are concrescing subjects, whose boundaries with the world are porous, such that the feelings of others can and do become part of our own lives. From this angle, at every moment of our lives we are shaped, not only by our personal pasts but also by intensified fields of shared feeling—fields that can widen our care and deepen our humanity, or constrict our vision and license harm, depending on how intensity is integrated into the becoming of who we are together.
A crowd, then, is an intensified field of shared feeling. Whether these intensified fields are agents in their own right—whether they have minds of their own—remains an open question. What we know for certain is this: as individuals, we can be swept up into them. We feel at one with something more than ourselves, and in that felt unity we may become either more fully human—or something frighteningly less.
Crowd Psychology
So we learn from the field known as crowd psychology. It emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as scholars sought to understand episodes of mass behavior that appeared to defy prevailing assumptions about rational agency and moral restraint. Early theorists such as Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), whose influential book The Crowd was published in 1895, emphasized the dangerous side of crowds. Le Bon portrayed crowds as sites of emotional contagion, heightened suggestibility, and regression, where individuals lose critical judgment and are swept into collective passions. From this perspective, crowds appeared primarily as threats—to social order, to reason, and to individual responsibility—and early crowd psychology took on a strongly cautionary, even alarmist, tone.
Subsequent thinkers complicated this picture. The sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), writing at the turn of the twentieth century—most notably in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)—highlighted the generative power of collective life, introducing the concept of collective effervescence to describe moments when shared emotion produces meaning, solidarity, and even experiences of the sacred. In the interwar period, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), offered a psychoanalytic account of crowds, emphasizing identification with leaders and shared ideals, and showing how libidinal bonds can suspend individual conscience while intensifying loyalty and aggression.
In the mid-twentieth century, the cultural theorist Elias Canetti (1905–1994), in Crowds and Power (1960), explored the phenomenology of crowds—their bodily density, their desire for discharge, and their intimate relationship to power and violence. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, crowd psychology had become a plural field, with social psychologists increasingly emphasizing identity, norms, leadership, and context rather than irrationality alone.
Digital Crowds
In recent decades, crowd psychology has expanded to include digital crowds—online gatherings that lack physical proximity yet display many of the same dynamics as embodied crowds. What matters psychologically is not shared location but shared intensity. Through social media platforms, comment threads, livestreams, and messaging networks, we are drawn into rapidly forming fields of shared feeling in which outrage, fear, enthusiasm, or moral certainty can spread with remarkable speed. Digital crowds synchronize attention and emotion through repetition, mimicry, and amplification, often producing a powerful sense of belonging and urgency despite the physical separation of participants.
At the same time, digital crowds differ from physical crowds in ways that often make their negative effects more severe. Anonymity or distance weakens ordinary social inhibitions; algorithms amplify emotionally charged content; and the absence of immediate embodied feedback makes it easier to dehumanize others. Moreover, digital crowds rarely dissolve cleanly: posts remain, grievances accumulate, and affect can be reactivated again and again. From a Whiteheadian perspective, digital platforms generate persistent, intensified fields of shared feeling that can repeatedly shape how we concresce as subjects—sometimes widening care and solidarity, but often narrowing vision, hardening divisions, and licensing forms of cruelty that many of us would resist in face-to-face settings.
- Jay McDaniel with help from Open AI (for historical information on the field of crowd psychology)
This is not to say that our solitary self is closer to who we really are than our crowd-immersed self. In moments of collective effervescence, we may become more fully ourselves in some way. Sometimes, when we are gathered with others, we are lifted into courage, generosity, and joy. Consider a crowd singing together at a vigil after a tragedy, where strangers hold one another in silence and song; or a nonviolent march in which fear gives way to resolve and mutual care; or a festival where music and dance open us to a shared delight that none of us could have generated by ourselves. In such moments, we feel enlarged rather than diminished, more responsible rather than less.
At other times, however, we humans can be, an are, pulled into cruelty, fear, and destruction. Consider a lynch mob, a pogrom, or a riot fueled by rage and humiliation, where ordinary moral inhibitions collapse; or a wartime frenzy in which killing feels justified by belonging; or a crowd whipped into hatred by slogans that reduce the world to enemies and threats. Here, too, we are carried beyond ourselves—but into a narrowed and brutalized form of togetherness that later feels foreign and shameful.
Collective frenzy at competitive sporting events occupies a more ambiguous space between these two poles. On the one hand, we feel at one with our team and with fellow fans, sharing joy, hope, and identity. On the other hand, at least for the duration of the contest, we may momentarily turn the other team—and sometimes its supporters—into an enemy to be defeated. The intensity is usually contained by rules and ritual, but it reveals how easily solidarity can slide toward exclusion, and how thin the line can be between life-giving unity and antagonistic belonging.
Truth be told, even allegedly positive forms of crowd psychology often carry within them a felt intensity that unfolds within a we–they distinction. In acts of resistance, for example, we may be happy in the moment because we are absorbed in an internalized in-group love and joy, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Our “collective effervescence,” to use Durkheim’s phrase, rests not only on shared hope but also on the presence of others whom we are resisting and whom we hope will, in some sense, be overcome.
Crowd psychology has long oscillated between suspicion and hope, torn between seeing crowds as dangerous mobs or as sources of solidarity and renewal—or, more unsettlingly, as both at once. And even when we are alone, we are in a certain sense en-crowded. The people whom we love or fear, the natural world, the archetypes and images of the collective whole, are within us even as more than us.
A Whiteheadian perspective helps us hold these truths together without collapsing one into the other.
It does so by shifting our focus away from crowds as entities with minds of their own and toward how we ourselves are concrescing subjects, whose boundaries with the world are porous, such that the feelings of others can and do become part of our own lives. From this angle, at every moment of our lives we are shaped, not only by our personal pasts but also by intensified fields of shared feeling—fields that can widen our care and deepen our humanity, or constrict our vision and license harm, depending on how intensity is integrated into the becoming of who we are together.
A crowd, then, is an intensified field of shared feeling. Whether these intensified fields are agents in their own right—whether they have minds of their own—remains an open question. What we know for certain is this: as individuals, we can be swept up into them. We feel at one with something more than ourselves, and in that felt unity we may become either more fully human—or something frighteningly less.
Crowd Psychology
So we learn from the field known as crowd psychology. It emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as scholars sought to understand episodes of mass behavior that appeared to defy prevailing assumptions about rational agency and moral restraint. Early theorists such as Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), whose influential book The Crowd was published in 1895, emphasized the dangerous side of crowds. Le Bon portrayed crowds as sites of emotional contagion, heightened suggestibility, and regression, where individuals lose critical judgment and are swept into collective passions. From this perspective, crowds appeared primarily as threats—to social order, to reason, and to individual responsibility—and early crowd psychology took on a strongly cautionary, even alarmist, tone.
Subsequent thinkers complicated this picture. The sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), writing at the turn of the twentieth century—most notably in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)—highlighted the generative power of collective life, introducing the concept of collective effervescence to describe moments when shared emotion produces meaning, solidarity, and even experiences of the sacred. In the interwar period, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), offered a psychoanalytic account of crowds, emphasizing identification with leaders and shared ideals, and showing how libidinal bonds can suspend individual conscience while intensifying loyalty and aggression.
In the mid-twentieth century, the cultural theorist Elias Canetti (1905–1994), in Crowds and Power (1960), explored the phenomenology of crowds—their bodily density, their desire for discharge, and their intimate relationship to power and violence. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, crowd psychology had become a plural field, with social psychologists increasingly emphasizing identity, norms, leadership, and context rather than irrationality alone.
Digital Crowds
In recent decades, crowd psychology has expanded to include digital crowds—online gatherings that lack physical proximity yet display many of the same dynamics as embodied crowds. What matters psychologically is not shared location but shared intensity. Through social media platforms, comment threads, livestreams, and messaging networks, we are drawn into rapidly forming fields of shared feeling in which outrage, fear, enthusiasm, or moral certainty can spread with remarkable speed. Digital crowds synchronize attention and emotion through repetition, mimicry, and amplification, often producing a powerful sense of belonging and urgency despite the physical separation of participants.
At the same time, digital crowds differ from physical crowds in ways that often make their negative effects more severe. Anonymity or distance weakens ordinary social inhibitions; algorithms amplify emotionally charged content; and the absence of immediate embodied feedback makes it easier to dehumanize others. Moreover, digital crowds rarely dissolve cleanly: posts remain, grievances accumulate, and affect can be reactivated again and again. From a Whiteheadian perspective, digital platforms generate persistent, intensified fields of shared feeling that can repeatedly shape how we concresce as subjects—sometimes widening care and solidarity, but often narrowing vision, hardening divisions, and licensing forms of cruelty that many of us would resist in face-to-face settings.
- Jay McDaniel with help from Open AI (for historical information on the field of crowd psychology)
Eight Key Ideas
1. An ontology of the concrescing subject and responsibility
Drawing on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, crowd psychology gains an account of the concrescing subject that includes not only shared feeling but also an act of decision, whether conscious or unconscious. Even when we are swept up in crowds—physical or digital, joyful or violent—our experience is not merely something that happens to us. It is something we take up and integrate. This makes it possible to speak meaningfully about personal responsibility without denying the powerful shaping force of collective intensity.
2. Shared feeling as fundamental to human life
Whitehead emphasizes that feeling is not private or sealed off within individuals. Concrescing subjects feel the feelings of others—through bodily presence, tone of voice, gesture, rhythm, symbol, and atmosphere—and are thereby shaped by intensified fields of feeling. Crowd psychology, from this perspective, is not an anomaly but an intensification of ordinary relational life, in which shared affect becomes especially powerful in forming who we are and how we act.
3. Openness to the agency of intense fields (societies, nexus, propositions)
A Whiteheadian perspective remains open to the possibility that intensified fields of shared feeling may exercise a form of agency of their own, even if they are not unified minds or moral agents in a strong sense. Drawing on Whitehead’s ideas of societies, nexūs, and propositions, crowds can be understood as temporary nexūs of interrelated concrescing subjects whose overlapping patterns of feeling and response give them a momentary coherence. Within these nexūs, propositions—slogans, images, narratives, symbols, enemies, hopes—circulate as lures for feeling, shaping how individual subjects integrate their experience and what possibilities feel compelling or urgent. In this way, intensified fields can channel attention, amplify affect, and invite particular forms of action, exerting real causal influence without displacing individual responsibility or requiring the assumption of a literal “group mind.”
4. Moral criteria for evaluating crowds
Whitehead provides normative resources for judging crowd experiences. Because experience aims not only at intensity but at Beauty, understood as harmony with intensity, we can ask whether a crowd widens care or narrows it, deepens responsibility or licenses harm, integrates difference or reduces the world to enemies and threats. This allows us to distinguish between life-giving and destructive forms of togetherness.
5. Community as formative of growth
Whitehead highlights the positive power of community in shaping human development. Crowds and collective experiences can foster courage, solidarity, creativity, and moral growth, helping individuals become more than they could become alone. This makes it possible to appreciate genuinely positive crowd experiences—festivals, vigils, movements of care and resistance—as real contributors to human flourishing rather than mere psychological anomalies.
6. Destructive Crowds
Whitehead also offers a serious way of speaking about evil in the context of crowd life. Evil is not simply wrongdoing or moral failure, but debilitating suffering inflicted on others and the loss of unrealized possibilities. Destructive crowds—especially those that license humiliation, exclusion, or violence—can thus be understood as failures of becoming, in which shared intensity forecloses rather than expands what human life might have become.
7. Ecology
Whitehead extends the idea of shared feeling beyond human gatherings alone. Immersive experiences in the more-than-human world—forests, oceans, storms, animals, and landscapes—can also shape us through powerful fields of shared feeling. This ecological dimension helps crowd psychology attend to the ways human becoming is always entangled with a larger, living world.
8. Theology
Finally, Whitehead’s philosophy introduces a theological depth to crowd psychology. If God is, as Whitehead puts it, a fellow sufferer who understands, then divine understanding includes not only our private intentions but also the social and affective conditions—crowds included—that shape our actions. This perspective encourages forgiveness and inclusivity without excusing harm, holding responsibility together with compassion and hope for transformation.