At the end of the 19th century, a direction was formed in Western European social science that claimed to be a subject area between classical psychology and sociology. The research presented in the article describes that collective psychology, which claimed to be an independent science of social associations at the end of the 19th – early 20th centuries, allowed excessive generalization of the concept of a crowd, uncriticism in spreading the processes taking place in it to other communities of people, and also differed in downplaying individual differences of members of crowds and exaggerating the power of the phenomena of infection, imitation and suggestion. Subjectivism of interpretations, gaps in empirical evidence and a number of methodological errors prevented the implementation of this approach. However, the theories of crowd, which were developed in line with the collective psychology, were reflected in the criminal legislation of the Russian Empire in terms of establishing responsibility for mass crimes. The negative connotations of spontaneous associations in the works of G. Lebon, S. Siegel, G. Tard, P. Rossi played a significant role in identifying the “skopishche”, the “spiritualized crowd” as a collective subject of criminal behavior, which was an undoubted step backward in the development of Russian jurisprudence.