Collective Conscience
The concept of collective conscience refers to the beliefs and behaviors shared in a community and functioning like a separate and generally dominant force compared to the individual conscience. According to this theory, a company, a nation, a group would constitute an entity behaving like a total individual.
The expression was initially used by the sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) in several of its works. The concept was taken again by other sociologists and psychologists thereafter, like Maurice Halbwachs in 1939.
In “the crowd psychology” (1895), Gustave the Good defines crowd by these terms: “ a meeting of unspecified individuals, whatever their nationality, their profession or their sex, whatever also the chances which gather them ”. The Good says whereas when these individuals gather, it “ is undoubtedly formed a collective, transitory heart, but presenting characters very Nets. The community then becomes what, for lack of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if one prefers, a psychological crowd. She forms only one being and is subjected to the law of the mental unit of crowd. ”
Other significances of the expression
The expression is also used in the work groups to indicate the conscience that the member of the group has his relation with the other members of a “project team”.
The collective conscience is a term which is sometimes applied to the animal behavior to which one lends collective instincts inherited rather than an individual free will.
The collective conscience, in certain spiritual theories, indicates the sum of the virtues and the defects of a population forming a homogeneous whole, a kind of average which determines the “level of spiritual conscience” of the unit.
In others the “collective conscience” refers to the supposed existence of a single conscience of which all the beings would be the expression.
Certain more ordinary phenomena of crowd like the birth and the circulation of the same (or " ideas all faites") such as they were identified by the memetic school of Richard Dawkins, approach this concept.
See too
Behavior
References
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