The Psychology of Mimetic Contagion
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My friend and colleague Dr. Mary Talley Bowden recently posed this important question, which has puzzled many people during the pandemic:
I suggest that two accounts of social psychology—the mass formation theory of Matthias Desmet and the mimetic contagion theory of Rene Girard, help to answer this question. These two theories also go a long way toward explaining some of the more puzzling behaviors we saw emerge during the pandemic.
The first theory, mass formation, was brought to public attention when my friend Robert Malone briefly summarized it on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The internet blew up as people searched to learn more about the concept. The tech overlords at Google intervened to bury information on the theory when people searched for “mass formation”. This interview landed Malone in permanent Twitter prison and brought the furies down on Rogan.
But Desmet’s theory is based on a body of sound social theory and psychology that has accumulated over the past hundred years. As Professor Desmet of the University of Ghent describes, under conditions of mass formation, people buy into a narrative not because it is true, but because it cements a social bond they desperately need.
Mass (or crowd) formation emergences in a society under very specific conditions. The first condition is that people experience a lack of connectedness to other people, a lack of meaningful social bonds. Consider the the loneliness epidemic which was worsened by the lockdowns. Our only bonds were virtual, an impoverished replacement for real human connection.
The second condition is a lack of meaning in life, which follows directly from the lack of embeddedness in social networks—familial, professional, religious, etc. Desmet mentions in this connection that Gallup polls in 2017 found 40% of people experienced their job as completely meaningless, with another 20% reporting a strong lack of meaning in their work. Only 13% found their work meaningful.
Other social theorists from Max Weber to Emile Durkheim have documented this trend toward social atomization and loss of the religious dimension over the last two centuries in the West. The occurrence of mass formation thus became more frequent in the 19th and 20th Centuries, when a mechanistic view of man and the world began to predominate.
Editor’s note: The theories of group psychology outlined in this piece are very interesting and plausible – but in my view they cannot be applied only to one group. It seems to me that the polarisation occurring in the United States could partly be explained by “mimetic contagion” and “mass formation” occurring on both sides of the political divide?
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