“Mass Formation” – popularized by Mattias Desmet – is not in psychology textbooks. But we see examples of it every day as delusional mobs act like singular, hypnotized units: blindly following authority even when – to outside observers – they are obviously acting like cult members.

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Mattias Desmet is widely known as the pioneer researcher of mass formation (sometimes called “Mass Delusional Psychosis”) and mob mentality. His work gained prominence in 2021 when Dr. Robert Malone discussed it on The Joe Rogan Experience as an explanation for the strange actions of people during the pandemic. The episode was quickly censored by YouTube after being viewed by millions.

Mattias Desmet is professor of psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Desmet is the author of over one hundred peer-reviewed academic papers. In 2018 he received the Evidence-Based Psychoanalytic Case Study Prize of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and in 2019 he received the Wim Trijsburg Prize of the Dutch Association of Psychotherapy. Follow him at https://x.com/desmetmattias and learn more at https://mattiasdesmet.org 

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