Gustave Le Bon was an early explorer of this phenomenon as a function of crowds. Le Bon introduced his crowd psychology theory in his 1895 publication "The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind". The French psychologist characterized his posited effect of crowd mentality, whereby individual personalities become dominated by the collective mindset of the crowd. Le Bon viewed crowd behavior as "unanimous, emotional, and intellectually weak". He theorized that a loss of personal responsibility in crowds leads to an inclination to behave primitively and hedonistically by the entire group. This resulting mentality, according to Le Bon, belongs more to the collective than any individual, so that individual traits are submerged. Already, Le Bon was tending toward the conception of deindividuation as a state brought on by a lowering of accountability, resulting from a degree of anonymity due to membership within a crowd, where attention is shifted from the self to the more stimulating, external qualities of the group’s action (which may be extreme).