PSYCHOLOGIST

Gustave Le Bon

1841 - 1931

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Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. A native of Nogent-le-Rotrou, Le Bon qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Paris in 1866. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Gustave Le Bon has received more than 839,777 page views. His biography is available in 53 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 50 in 2019). Gustave Le Bon is the 15th most popular psychologist, the 220th most popular biography from France (down from 194th in 2019) and the 2nd most popular French Psychologist.

Gustave le bon is most famous for his theory of crowd psychology. He believed that crowds are composed of three types of people: the intelligent, the semi-intelligent, and the imbeciles. The intelligent and semi-intelligent people are able to think for themselves and form their own opinions, but the imbeciles do not have the mental capacity to think for themselves and instead follow the opinions of the intelligent and semi-intelligent people.

Memorability Metrics

  • 840k

    Page Views (PV)

  • 73.06

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 53

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 13.52

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 2.27

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Among PSYCHOLOGISTS

Among psychologists, Gustave Le Bon ranks 15 out of 235Before him are Jacques Lacan, John Dewey, Viktor Frankl, William James, Erik Erikson, and Carl Rogers. After him are Albert Bandura, John B. Watson, Kurt Lewin, Daniel Kahneman, Irvin D. Yalom, and Wilhelm Reich.

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1841, Gustave Le Bon ranks 3Before him are Antonín Dvořák, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. After him are Edward VII, Berthe Morisot, Georges Clemenceau, Otto Wagner, Itō Hirobumi, Henry Morton Stanley, Frédéric Bazille, Henri Fayol, and Emil Theodor Kocher. Among people deceased in 1931, Gustave Le Bon ranks 2Before him is Thomas Edison. After him are Khalil Gibran, Anna Pavlova, Otto Wallach, Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, Omar Mukhtar, Albert A. Michelson, Arthur Schnitzler, Geli Raubal, Lili Elbe, and Joseph Joffre.

Others Born in 1841

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Others Deceased in 1931

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In France

Among people born in France, Gustave Le Bon ranks 220 out of 6,770Before him are Pope Urban IV (1185), Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789), Charles de Batz de Castelmore d'Artagnan (1611), André Breton (1896), Gilles Deleuze (1925), and Pope Innocent VI (1282). After him are Hortense de Beauharnais (1783), Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1900), Gustave Doré (1832), Léon Foucault (1819), Bernard Arnault (1949), and François Boucher (1703).

Among PSYCHOLOGISTS In France

Among psychologists born in France, Gustave Le Bon ranks 2Before him are Jacques Lacan (1901). After him are Alfred Binet (1857), Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882), Pierre Janet (1859), Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839), Émile Coué (1857), Henri Wallon (1879), Françoise Dolto (1908), Boris Cyrulnik (1937), Jean Laplanche (1924), and Jacques-Alain Miller (1944).