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The Madness of Crowds - Now Online - Future IQ

4,592 views Wait, is this logic right? • Aug 29, 2025
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Why do crowds so often lose their minds? History is full of moments when ordinary people, once gathered together, transformed into something uncontrollable, such as riots, lynch mobs, revolutions, stampedes, or even the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland. But today, the most dangerous crowds are no longer in the streets. They’re online.

Digital mobs, cancel culture, trolling campaigns, and viral pile-ons can erupt faster, spread wider, and hit harder than any physical crowd ever could. Anonymity lowers empathy, algorithms amplify outrage, and group belonging fuels the fire. What begins with a few angry voices can quickly cascade into a storm where responsibility disappears and cruelty thrives.

In this episode of Future IQ, we explore the strange psychology behind why people behave so differently in groups than they do alone. From Freud’s theories to modern neuroscience, from stock market bubbles to Instagram’s “kindness prompts,” the story reveals how easily crowds can tip into madness and how small design choices can make them wise again.

This is not just about history or theory. It’s about the world we live in right now, every time we log in.

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More Videos:
System 1 vs System 2 - Mastering Both Your Brains: https://youtu.be/DIVTMooO7o4
Group Conformity in Sociology - Why Do We Follow Social Norms?: https://youtu.be/_XhIECCt_P8
The Internet Is Making You Stupid: https://youtu.be/ftSJN9R-IY4
Democracy's Biggest Lie: https://youtu.be/ns57h46YjZ8
You're Not Lazy - You're Just Rewarded Wrong: https://youtu.be/-6tVcOfnwDs
Simple Maths Explains Why Rich Get Richer: https://youtu.be/i2YrICwDR5g

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology
https://johnsuler.com/article_pdfs/online_dis_effect.pdf
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw2688
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/10/20/23413581/instagram-nudging-meta-creators-wellbeing-bullying-harassment
https://esports.gg/news/league-of-legends/honor-system-league-of-legends-new-era-of-player-recognition/

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Madness of the Crowds

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Transcript

Shriant crowds can be mad like literally insane right beyond a certain point a crowd takes on a life of its own and becomes unpredictable uncontrollable dangerous and the crowd ends up doing things which nobody in the crowd actually wanted to do. Yeah, we've seen examples of this in a lot of religious contexts. Yeah. a religious mob which goes and attacks people of a certain religion or a certain ethnicity or a lynch mob where a group goes and there's one person who behaved badly and the group just beats him to death or something like that right parties I remember there are other kinds of crowds also crowd behaviors so stampedes okay or revolutions which overthrow governments
or even financial like the Dutch tulip mania of 1600s where People were buying tulips. Prices were going up. So more people were buying tulips and just it went so crazy that there was a point where people were buying a single tulip flower for a million dollars. Okay. A million dollars. Yes. Wow. That is absolutely going crazy. But this actually reminds me of a quote from the movie Men in Black. Tommy Lee Jones plays Agent K and he says, "A person is smart but people are stupid." Absolutely. which I think is a beautiful encapsulation of this entire uh mob mentality, herd mentality kind of a scenario. Right.
Right. Yeah. So we have to understand why is people different from just a collection of persons. Right. Yeah. So uh let's try to look at this right. Basically mob psychology, okay, has been studied for a long time. And what really happens there is that a person when they become a part of a crowd, they sort of lose a sense of individual responsibility, right? They no longer think of themselves as a person. They think of them as a part of the group. And this loss of responsibility is fairly important because now you are no longer responsible for your own actions. Right?
You feel that you can behave any way you want because nobody is going to blame single out a few people to blame when the entire crowd has done something right. So because of this generally there is a perception of lower legal risk lower uh liability right a different angle to this comes from Freud okay now according to Freud the brain consists of three parts okay so there is the id which has all the base desires right like it it just wants it what it wants right food and comfort and status and sex and so on right but there is the super ego which understands society And it understands that there are rules and that you have
to follow rules and you can't let the ego go free and do what it wants to do. And then primarily the ego which sits in between the super ego and the id and decides when should we let the id do what it wants to do and most of the time you get super ego one of the rules and say you know what we have to follow this rule right what freud kind of points out is that when you are part of the crowd the ego sort of gives up its responsibility and says you know what this is now the crowd's responsibility ities. So the id is free to do what it wants or at least
a little more free, right? Inhibitions are reduced. Yeah. Yeah. Because your super ego is now essentially being controlled or dictated by a collective super ego. So the ego is like I can't handle so many super egos. I'm going to let the it be and let it do what it wants. But I mean basically you lose a sense of yourself as a person. So there is no longer a manager is not needed there. Right. Correct. So this increases with the size of the crowd right. Uh one more thing I want to point out here right just going back to our earlier episodes that this seems like you know if you think of system one system two system one is our
lower instinctual parts of the brain and system two is the rational thinking part when you are part of the crowd system one becomes more prominent and system two is like you know what I don't need to worry too much here right because responsibility is not really there right so then the collective mind takes over And it kills wisdom. Right. Okay. But there is one more reason which is hormones. Right. Now we go back to the African savana. I was waiting for you to go there. Absolutely. And we are hunting. Right.
We can't hunt alone. Yeah. Human beings we hunt in groups and the entire group is running and adrenaline and testosterone and everything is courarssing. Yeah. And there is research which we talked about in an earlier episode which points out that these hormones they make us more aggressive. They make us take more risks. They bring out more of our system one. And you can see that when you're part of the group these things happen. I mean you're not charging an animal but our brain still seems to think so.
Right. At that point, I think you're basically giving into what they call your baser instincts. Exactly. You're purely instinctual at that point. You're trying to, you know, sort of be one with the rest of them. And everybody's trying to be one with the entire group. And so, it's a it's a whole different beast. I could actually say it's not necessarily, it's a little more nuanced. We will get to that, right? Not everybody is fully instinctual. There are different people at different levels. But how that flows through all of them we will take a look at right but just one thing I want to point out is that the research about hormones and it affecting these things has been done
very precisely even with stock markets and they have found that similar effects exist because of hormones on your behavior in the stock market. So that explains tulip mania and GameStop also, right? Okay. Apes together strong has a lot of evolutionary connotations as well. Absolutely. What what I really would like to know or would like to find out is how does this madness start, right? So like I said, right, different people are at different levels of being instinctual, right? Uh just depending on your background and your IQ level. uh there are some people who are you know not the smartest of the lot right so they are more instinctual and there are some people who are much smarter much
more controlled and so on the crowd consists of all of them right now when you are in a crowd and the adrenaline is flowing and some of the ego has been dissolved a little bit right at this point the lowest layers of the people if I might talk about people in terms of The lowest ones, the ones who are the most instinctual, now suddenly they feel like they have the permission to do what they want. Okay. And they go ahead and do it, right? Because there is a loss of responsibility and so on and all of that that you just mentioned earlier.
Now this affects the next layer just about them. The ones who are on a borderline who would have managed to keep control. But now what they see is well other people are also doing it right. So they kind of give themselves permission right? So there is you know this set of people is like okay yeah Phil then you know why was I controlling myself right so they go ahead and do it okay then this spreads to the next level right so there is now a cascade this is a technical term in research cascade okay at the higher levels what is happening is that it is not like oh I can also do it okay at some point you
are like oh I better do it otherwise they will think I'm not one of them right yeah I can see how that can happen where people are like everybody's doing it why am I not doing it yeah this is we have talked about this group conformance right because you want to be a part of the group so and at some level is it is also preference falsification because you're like everybody's doing it they must have a reason to do it so I might as well exactly so the technical word there is cascades and group contagion right contagion okay uh very viral kind of a name that is. But hold on a second. Uh I know this sounds a bit cliched but like
not all crowds do this. Yes. #notall crowds, right? Well, yeah. So there are conditions for this to happen. First of all, there should be enough low threshold people in the group. If everybody is like sensible, calm people, the thing is not going to get started at all. Right. Right. when you mentioned that they don't have their ego doesn't have so much control on their head those kind of people. Second is that the whole group has to be sort of homogeneous in the sense that you know what is happening in the cascade and group contagion is that your manager ego is being removed and you're going down to your system one id level right now everybody should have roughly
similar belief systems and similar so if the people there are people who have a common ideology so that when the inhibitions are removed everyone wants to kind of do the same thing then it works. If you have a group which is heterogenous and when the inhibitions are removed this person wants to dance and that person wants to run then you don't have the contagion. Right. Good point. Well in this case then preference falsification is not exactly what is happening. Group conformism is what is happening. So I was wrong to bring in preference falsification earlier but maybe in another context uh that might be the case. But we also did an episode on the wisdom of the crowds
where we pointed out that when a crowd comes together to pull its intelligence and its thoughts uh on something then something positive comes out of it. Yeah. So basically there are there can be these two different kinds of groups right as in we talk about wisdom of the crowds and then you can also talk about madness of the crowds and what the hell is going on right? Yeah. Basically the thing is that wisdom of the crowds works because the different people in the crowd have different backgrounds, different ideologies, different aids, different system ones, right? As a result when the whole crowd comes together and their inner things come out, right? inner things.
They cancel each other out when a heterogeneous crowd and then what is left over is kind of the average thing which is usually a sensible wise thing. Right? But when the group is much more homogeneous then what comes out is the ideology which all of them share. Right? So you can see why in the first case you get wisdom and in the second case you get uh madness. Right? In the first case you are getting democracy. In the second case, you are getting a dictatorship of a particular ideology. Right?
That's actually a very fascinating insight into the matter. Where there is homogeneity, you will end up coalesing more around the id and where there is heterogenity, you will end up coalesing more around the super ego because a lot of the ids will cancel each other out. And the super ego is what then assumes control or assumes prevalence. Well, in fact, all the rules of the super ego exist to so that heterogeneous different people can live together happily in a society, right? But here is a question.
Why are we spending so much time talking about this? Always what we do is we bring up topics like this because they're like extra important these days, right? So why is it extra important these days? Oh, I can see where you're going with this. It is extra important because all of the mob mentality that we mentioned in terms of physical spaces are now translating into online spaces. Yes. And it is much worse. I mean not not much worse physically but much worse in the intensity and how often it happens and how quickly it happens.
Right. Especially because online spaces afford a degree of anonymity to the person. Well, there is a whole bunch of things in fact that is there but much more. Right. So John Suler has a classic paper in 2004 where he talks about the online disinhibition effect. Online disinhibition effect. Right? So it's not just anonymity. It is that online there is no eye contact. I cannot see your expressions. I cannot see your body language. As a result empathy goes down. I no longer think of you as a person. I no longer think of you as a human being. Right? I think of you as an icon on the screen. So it's not really real or as text on the screen.
Yeah. Another problem is that the feedback is kind of asymmetrical, right? So if I do something nasty, right? Some idiot somewhere is going to like it pretty quickly and I get right a good feedback. Oh, this is I should do this more. Whereas the negative feedback of somebody reacting badly, somebody feeling bad or a moderator yelling at you, right? All of that happens much later. That part is not instantaneous, right? And also because it is faceless as you mentioned, it doesn't hit as much. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's the part, right?
There isn't like a teacher or a manager staring at you. In real life, that happens and you quickly calm down, right? Whereas online that is not happening. So minimization of authority is also there, right? And of course, like you said, anonymity, right? This significantly increases the frequency of mobbing and the intensity of mobbing. But like we have talked about in a few previous episodes, a big big extra factor to all of this is the algorithm, right? Yes. Because all of this we are doing on places like Instagram and Twitter and so on where that company has an algorithm and that algorithm primarily exists to increase the amount of time you spend there. If the algorithm just makes you happy, you will
spend a little amount of time and then you will go off for a walk in the sunshine, right? If it makes you angry, you're going to sit there and for the next hour you'll be writing like, you know, angry messages, right? So the algorithm knows that it should get you angry. It should get you worked up and that's why that is what it is pushing. That is what it is amplifying, right? But to be honest, we've always lived in an attention economy. It's just that the attention economy prior to the birth of the internet was in physical spaces.
Now the attention economy is in the digital space and because attention is currency, the algorithms or rather the people who make the algorithms have determined that the best way to gain or earn more of this currency is by making people stay on the app and the easiest way or the uh most likely way to make them stay on the app is engagement. Yeah. And and the easiest way to get engagement is by making people angry at each other. Yes, there are a few more differences between real life and online, right?
In real life, you must have heard of the bystander effect, right? That if somebody needs help and there's only one person who can provide that help, that person is going to provide help. But if there are 12 people in any of whom could provide help then there is a chance that all of them will assume that the other one will do and then after a while they will think oh nobody's helping so maybe that's the right thing to do anyways right and in online situations there's always a bystander effect right because there's always like a thousand people there and nobody's doing anything so you assume that nothing is to be done right uh and also Um
there is a I mean one is that lonely people people who are badly adjusted in real life so they don't have friends they are feeling left out they go online and now this behavior gives them faceless friends who are liking their outrageous validation right and finally there is a personality self- selection right that happy people spend a lot of time with their friends, right? Whereas the angry people, the trolls spend a lot of time online. So online is has much more trolls than real life has.
You just have to walk out to see, right? Except most of our life now is lived online. So we end up dealing more with the trolls than with the happy people. So we I guess have to make a conscious choice about going out and meeting the happy people. Yeah. One more problem that happens online and this is actually a problem created by people intentionally not just the algorithm is that people form gangs and there are coordinated attacks right brigading I remember Reddit had this uh problem of uh various subreddits brigading other subreddits just either to troll or sometimes to have fun. The basic idea of brigading is that there is a group which together decides that
today we are going to attack this person for whatever reason right u and this happens on 4chan it happens on Reddit and you know you know that there are WhatsApp groups in India where people are doing this and they might choose the target will be on Twitter or Instagram but they will coordinate on WhatsApp right so this coordinated attack is that there will be a place online where they get together, they coordinate the attack. So it starts with the call for attack. One person picks a victim and then writes an inflammatory message saying, you know, this person did this, this this this. So we should do this, this, this. That's bad.
Call for attack. Second is the preparation. Everybody decides how they're going to attack, what they're going to attack, when they are going to do it, right? Then the actual attack happens, right? Coordinated. Everybody goes brigade. Yeah. Lands up there and different ways of attacking. Then they take screenshots. They come back to their original place of coordination to gloat. Yeah. And you can see how this becomes a self-fulfilling cycle, right? Somebody attacks, come backs and gloat. That gives somebody else uh oh, I should also try this. This sounds like so much fun.
And you know when the attack is kind of done, then there is also celebration. So all these lonely angry people now they have found a community where they did some group activity together and then they had a celebration right. So this is just just like you know a Diwali celebration except like without any of the good stuff. But this actually has now been weaponized and this now is used in a lot of um actually sort of commissioned behaviors like there is PR washing there is the entire concept of a toolkit gang and all of that which is briating when something like this exists politicians are going to use it as a tool right.
Absolutely. Yeah. So see one thing I want to do here uh and generally more in our episodes is talk about some of the older concepts that we have talked about which get used in understanding this right so one is that this is a tragedy of the commons right the online space where we could all be nice it's a community we could talk to each other we get information from each other but a few trolls for their little enjoyment are spoiling the whole thing for everyone and making the whole thing toxic and less useful. Right? Y then there is Gresham's law which is uh you know bad speech drives out good speech okay which is a
corollery of bad is stronger than good that we have talked about right we haven't done an episode on it yet we have been planning an episode on it we should do it yeah then there is also you know signaling of group membership right ah the price of membership I remember the price of membership so you go and do this bad behavior because you You know that's how you show you're part of this group which believes in doing this or attacking. Let's just call it for what it is a cult. We are all part of some cult or the other except we think our cult is better than other cults.
Correct. One more thing that is happening is that these people who think this is the right thing to do, this is the good thing to do. they feel proud of themselves is because they're getting trapped in their own little eco chamber which we talked about in the episode on content creation and content curation. Content curation. You're right. Yeah. And finally just the previous episode we talked about the majority illusion where a small minority of people who are loud and angry and very visible they give everyone the impression that oh everyone is doing this where it is only a tiny fraction right so I'm actually now thinking what do I do to make sure that I do not fall prey
to her mentality because it is very difficult to not get swept up in See, so you know I'm not a politician. I can't change all of society. But I can talk about you can make a difference to smaller communities, places where you have some control, right? There what has been found? This is a problem that we have been dealing with for a long time, right? And there's a bunch of nice little little techniques which work, right? Small changes can result in big uh outcomes, right? Like design matters. So for example, just simply slowing them down, right? At the time they're just feeling impulsive, uh, right? When they're just going to post, slow them down. There's a 20 second gap
between posts, right? Which becomes 10-second after you have shown that you are a good member and can become zero if you have been around for 2 years without causing any problems, right? An interesting variant on this design is something that uh X or Twitter sometimes employs. I don't know if it still employs it, but if it detects that your message might be hateful or violent, it actually stops you from posting it saying, "Do you really want to post this?" Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Are you sure? Just are you sure does work, right? Because for a minute, what it does is it disengages your system one and it engages your system two. We have talked about this in that
episode. Okay. Yes, we have. One more. Instagram had a kindness prompt. So when you are posting something and the algorithm decides that this is, you know, potentially offensive, it would just remind you maybe you should be kind. 50% of posters either deleted or edited their content after the kindness prompt. Right? Okay. Another just surprising thing which works uh which if you're a moderator of a community you can do is called disemblment. Disembblevelment. Yeah. So when somebody posts a nasty comment uh or a nasty post, right?
Don't delete it, right? Because that will just make them more angry. What you do is you edit it and remove all the wobbles, right? So people can still read it, right? You haven't censored them but the the the impact is not there. The sting is lost. Yeah. And not just that but this is clear and visible punishment and clear and visible signal to everybody that this kind of behavior is not quite acceptable here. Right. Yeah. And this mled sentence or text reads really funny. It reads like a poor attempt at a troll. So this is brilliant. It it works quite well right big communities have used it and what see it is better than deleting
completely right because deleting completely allows you to assume a sense of victimhood oh look what they did and no and others don't know that that bad behavior had happened and got deleted right whereas if it is sitting there visible in public bad behavior and we disembowled it that has a different kind of effect other simple things League of Legends started a system called reputation and awards for good behavior. Oh, okay. So, instead of trying to punish bad behavior, you reward good behavior and you know people start responding to that, right?
Yeah. We've seen that incentives or the kind of incentives that you give out matter. Absolutely. The other way to attack all of this is to remove that whole anonymity and loss of responsibility thing, right? So turn on videos, have real names. You know the one of the reasons why some of the platforms insist on you having real names. Another thing is that the feedback should be rapid, right? Negative feedback. I mean that was we said part of the problem, right? So thankfully now AI can start helping with some of those right. So on on these last two, I have my reservations because real names uh is a problem as we've sp spoken about in the preference
falsification episode where it takes away the anonymity that you might need to affect some change in some scenarios, some specific scenarios. Uh so that's that's that's one. And about the negative feedback given by AI, I am still not confident of AI being 100% specific and 100% sensitive. Yeah. So, uh you're right. Right. As in real names is not a good policy to apply everywhere. Right. But there are definitely places where it can and should be applied and there should be places that allow for anonymity. Right.
Yes. As for AI, I mean we have to try these things, right? The AI is getting better every day. At some point, it'll do a fairly good job. Like we keep talking about in the past, you don't want to compare the AI to a perfect system. You want to compare it to what is the alternative right now. And maybe it does a fairly decent job already. Right. So, Discord has an automod which people find useful. Um, okay. True. Another very interesting and useful thing is you know targeted deplatforming of the most of the worst offenders right because again in an episode on power laws we have seen that you know it seems like there is so much of this happening
but when you analyze you will see that there is a very tiny fraction of people who are responsible for most of it right and you just get rid of those and most of it suddenly disappears right I don't Oh man, the last time something like that was tried on a large scale, that person ended up becoming president of a very powerful country. But hold on, all of these are design related changes that we can effect and I know this might not make it to the end.
Yeah. But are there any personal changes that I can make in myself to make sure that I don't get swept up when an online herd, online mob comes and drags me with it? Well, I mean, even if the technology doesn't do these things, you do these things to yourself, which is slow down, ask yourself, are you sure? Tell yourself to be kind, right? I think that just works most of the time, right? No trigger uh happy reactions. Basically, disengage your system one every time you feel it going into overdrive. Yes. Actively engage system two. Yeah. And if you can't actively engage system two, find someone like you who will engage the system too.
And also take deep breaths because that engages your parasympathetic nervous system which reduces the bad hormones. Right. I know at least two people in the world who need to take really deep breaths every now and then, especially at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. Yes, I think everybody knows what their names are, but uh for now I think uh this is a good place to stop and take a couple of deep breaths ourselves. Shriant Naven, Future IQ