So many insights that it's difficult to catalogue them all. I'm going to quote one of the first in the field: Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind from the 1800's.
"The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction…" Look at how the townspeople stop talking about personal concerns (the crop, the dishes) the closer they get to the end of the lottery.
"the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation…" Individually, these people to have sympathy and emotions. The town expresses pride that the young man would draw for his mother, and they care for the injured. Jackson is very careful to draw them as sympathetic away from the mob, but the sympathy vanishes.
"it is quite evident that crowds are too impulsive and too mobile to be moral." Here is where Jackson clearly breaks from the theory of mob mentality. Most psychologists see a mob as an impulsive beast which reacts without time for thought or reflection. However, Jackson presents a town that has an entire year to reflect, and yet they go out of their way to avoid looking at or even mentioning that box until it's pulled out for the next year. They choose to surrender to the mob.
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