《乌合之众·第三编·不同群体的分类与描述·刑事陪审团》第1节
Being unable to study here every category of jury, I shall only examine the most important--that of the juries of the Court of Assize. These juries afford an excellent example of the heterogeneous crowd that is not anonymous. We shall find them display suggestibility and but slight capacity for reasoning, while they are open to the influence of the leaders of crowds, and they are guided in the main by unconscious sentiments. In the course of this investigation we shall have occasion to observe some interesting examples of the errors that may be made by persons not versed in the psychology of crowds. Juries, in the first place, furnish us a good example of the slight importance of the mental level of the different elements composing a crowd, so far as the decisions it comes to are concerned. We have seen that when a deliberative assembly is called upon to give its opinion on a question of a character not entirely technical, intelligence stands for nothing. For instance, a gathering of scientific men or of artists, owing to the mere fact that they form an assemblage, will not deliver judgments on general subjects sensibly different from those rendered by a gathering of masons or grocers. At various periods, and in particular previous to 1848, the French administration instituted a careful choice among the persons summoned to form a jury, picking the jurors from among the enlightened classes; choosing professors, functionaries, men of letters, &c. At the present day jurors are recruited for the most part from among small tradesmen, petty capitalists, and employes. Yet, to the great astonishment of specialist writers, whatever the composition of the jury has been, its decisions have been identical. Even the magistrates, hostile as they are to the institution of the jury, have had to recognise the exactness of the assertion. M. Berard des Glajeux, a former President of the Court of Assizes, expresses himself on the subject in his "Memoirs" in the following terms:--
注释摘要
勒庞在这段文字里要证明一个令他同时代人困惑的命题：陪审团的成员构成，不管来自社会哪个阶层、受过多少教育，对最后的裁决几乎没有任何影响。他先点明，刑事法庭的陪审团是一种非匿名的异质性群体，成员彼此可见，共同在场，表面上似乎应该更理性，但实际同样表现出极强的受暗示性，推理能力薄弱，容易被群体的领头者左右，主要由无意识的情感驱动。为了验证这一点，他拉出了一条法国…