Ark, does Laura have somewhere on the very bottom of one of the piles
Dynamics of Crowd-Minds. Patterns of Irrationality in Emotions, Beliefs and Actions by Andrew Adamatzky?
It's volume 54 of Non-Linear Science Series.
From Preface:
Mental Dynamics of a large mass of believing emotional entities, crowd-minds, acting at the edge of, or sometimes far beyond, rationality, was a subject of psychological studies in the last hundred years. As early as 1895 a similarity between crowds and spatiality distributed physical systems was implicitly brought up by Gustave Le Bon, who was a friend of Henri Poincare, and thus might have got a physical influence on his social theories. However, phenomenaof collective irrationality have never been studied from physics, mathematics and computer-science points of view. In the book we try to fill the gap, and thus develop abd study computational and automaton models of a crowd-mind.
What is crowd-mind? The crowd-mind emerges when formation of a crowd causes fusion of individual minds into one collective mind. In the crowd-mind 'derationalized by passion, deactualized by memory, ideas and purposes are reborn as irrational beliefs and symbols' (Moscovici, 1985). Members of crowd loose their individuality. The deindividualization results in emotional, impulsive and irrational behavior, self-catalytic activities, memory impairment, perceptual distortion and hyper-responsiveness to local neighbors; ultimately, this leads to 'distortion of traditional forms and structures' (Zimbardo, 1969). As Everett Dean Martin wrote in 1920:
' the crowd-mind is a phenomenon which should best be classed with dreams, delusions, and the various forms of automatic behavior'.
Rephrasing Ortega y Casset, we can say that the crowd-mind does 'not care to give reasons or even to be right', and this brings forward a key feature of the crowd-mind - the right not to be reasonable: 'the reason of unreason' (Ortega y Gasset, 1985).
SErge Moscovici indicates three notable symptoms of losing personality in favor of crowd mentality: decrease of intellectual component, increase of emotional component and disregard for personal profit (MOscovivi, 1985).
A collective delusion emerges when thought disorder interacts with disturbances of affect (Winters and Neale, 1983). The delusion may be seen as a symptom of mental disorder or at least collective divergence from the norm (MNoscovici, 1985). Collective behavior of crowd-minds is highly non-linear because of mutual actions between delusive thinking, emotional contagion and also 'collective movements and collective outburst' (Smelser, 1962). IN the book we study the non-linearity of crowd-minds using cellular automata, algebraic structures, artificial chemistry paradigms and mobile automata on lattices.
Book exploits paradigms of non-linear psychology, artificial life and sociodynamics to stimulate, analyse and characterize spatio-temporal dynamics of massive pools of mental entities, i.e non-trivial dynamics of crowd-minds.
This book takes a mathematical approach to ponerisation process.
It has lots of graphs, so would make a perfect entertainment for lonely rainy summer nights and a wonderful family reading!
pdf of PP presentation, Univ of Milano