The fear of the irrational crowd was a persistent point of focus among intellectuals at the end of the 19th century. Gustave Le Bon’s classic text, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), was emblematic of these concerns and fueled an interest in crowd theory, group behavior, and herd instinct. Le Bon didn’t use the term “herd instinct,” but the term became associated with the negative connotations about crowd behavior. In these interpretations, the herd instinct is associated with irrationality, transgression, a lapse of moral discipline, civil disturbance, and savagery. There was a widespread belief that collective fear would trigger a herd instinct that would devolve into violence. Also, around the turn of the 20th century, there was an increasing interest in the masses and mass media. However, concerning mass culture, the public is distinguished from the crowd in the sense that the public is a massive dispersion of individuals who are connected and extended in space and time with shared information and ideas gleaned from various media. It has mental cohesion, whereas the crowd is a physical and local matter.

Social psychologist Graham Wallas analyzed the constant social interaction in mass society. He concluded that firsthand experience began to be replaced with newspapers and mass media that delivered stimuli in the form of symbols and images so that experience increasingly depended on imagination rather than observation.