Collective Behaviour

11 Key excerpts on "Collective Behaviour"

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  An Introduction to Social Psychology

  Global Perspectives

  • James Alcock, Stan Sadava(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The Arab Spring: Social media such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have frequently been credited with spreading the flames of revolution during the Arab Spring – indeed some have even referred to the uprisings as the ‘Facebook Revolution’ (Howard et al., 2011; Moss, 2012). Indeed, social media appear to have played a crucial role. Despite years of the public dissatisfaction with their governments, it was not until emotionally distressing pictures and stories were circulated through social media that people became enraged and those revolutions were born. Communication is a key component in any uprising, both in terms of inflaming passions and organizing a collective response, and social media have the advantage that as long as they are in operation, authorities lose their ability to control the flow of information, and thus can no longer substitute propaganda for truth. Women in particular were front and centre in the Arab uprisings, emboldened by encouragement and coordination through social media to fight for social change (Radsch, 2012).

  What is Collective Behaviour?

  The examples above illustrate three defining characteristics of Collective Behaviour (Milgram & Toch, 1969). It is:

  1. A relatively rare phenomenon that emerges spontaneously in a collectivity of people (e.g., a crowd or an entire society).
  2. Unplanned and relatively unorganized, initially without a formal governance and without the specific rules and norms that characterize formal groups.
  3. Energized by inter-stimulation among the participants – that is, individuals are influenced by the actions of others, and their reactions in turn influence the very people who have affected them.

  Sometimes Collective Behaviour involves an intensification of anticipated reactions. For example, while teenagers may go to a rock concert expecting to be excited, interaction among audience members can create a collective experience that is much more powerful than anticipated and more intense than anything the individual would experience alone or in a small group. Inter-stimulation is reinforcing to some extent; otherwise the behaviour would quickly die out. If one person throws a rock through a window and is admonished by others, it is unlikely that this behaviour will spread. However, if some in the crowd cheer, then a second person may also break a window, and a third, and the behaviour may spread quickly throughout the throng.

  The study of Collective Behaviour is an important part of social psychology, not only in its own right, but also because there is hardly any aspect of social behaviour that does not occasionally find expression, sometimes even extreme expression, through some type of collective episode (Milgram & Toch, 1969). For example, prejudice is sometimes expressed through mob behaviour, which can involve aggression. Both attitude change and impression management are evident in fads and fashions; people adopt behaviours that would earlier have seemed frivolous (‘high fives’) or even repugnant (e.g. body piercing).

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  Group Dynamics

  • Donelson Forsyth(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  If we do not take up the job of understanding groups, who will? C R O W D S A N D C O L L E C T I V E S 575 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. C H AP T E R R E V IE W What is collective behavior? 1. A collective is a relatively large group of people who respond in a similar way to an event or situation. ■ Collectives differ from other types of groups in terms of size, proximity of the members, duration, conventionality, and intimacy of the relations among members. ■ Collectives sometimes engage in unusual behaviors (Evans and Bartholomew, 2009). 2. Gatherings combine aspects of smaller groups with qualities found in larger, more amor-phous, crowds. ■ Audiences and queues are more norma-tively regulated than crowds. Even rela-tively simple behaviors, such as clapping, are coordinated group-level actions. Vio-lations of norms in either type of collective generally lead to negative sanctioning. ■ Milgram ’ s studies of line breaking suggest that queue members are both group-and self-motivated (Milgram et al., 1986). 3. Crowds include common crowds, such as street crowds or public gatherings, audiences, queues, and mobs (aggressive mobs and panics). ■ Milgram and his associates (1969) created crowds on a New York City street by having people stare up at a building. The larger the initial seed group, the more people who joined the crowd. ■ Crowds, although unstable and short-lived, display consistent structures and behavioral tendencies.

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  The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis

  • Neil J. Smelser(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Social and Psychological Dimensions of Collective Behavior The subject of this essay is that class of social phenomena commonly grouped under the label "collective behavior"—including panics, crazes, fads, riots, reform movements, revolutionary movements, and religious cults. My starting point is the commonplace observation that such behavior manifests both social and psychological characteris- tics. On the one hand, it has a social dimension, since it involves collec- tive or group action by definition, and since many of its causes are rooted in social conditions—conditions such as economic hardship, so- cial disorganization, and political repression. On the other hand, it has a psychological dimension, since the deepest and most powerful human emotions—idealistic fervor, love, and violent rage, for example—are bared in episodes of collective behavior and since persons differ psycho- logically in their propensity to become involved in such episodes. Moreover, most theories that attempt to explain why people partici- pate in collective outbursts and collective movements stress either the social or the psychological aspect more or less exclusively, frequently rele- gating the other, underemphasized aspect to the realm of implicit as- sumptions. For example, Karl Marx regarded political revolutions as re- sulting primarily from a particular convergence of economic and social forces at a given stage in the evolution of a society; accordingly, the rev- olutionaries' psychology was not very important for Marx, since it, like the revolution itself, is a product of overwhelming laws of social devel- opment. By contrast, Wilfred Trotter (1922) traced human involvement This essay was originally published in Neil J. Smelser, Essays in Sociological Explana- tion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 92-121. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ. 36

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  Theory of Collective Behaviour

  • Neil J. Smelser(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Chapter I Analyzing Collective Behavior Introduction

  The Problem. In all civilizations men have thrown themselves into episodes of dramatic behavior, such as the craze, the riot, and the revolution. Often we react emotionally to these episodes. We stand, for instance, amused by the foibles of the craze, aghast at the cruelties of the riot, and inspired by the fervor of the revolution.

  The nature of these episodes has long excited the curiosity of speculative thinkers. In recent times this curiosity has evolved into a loosely defined field of sociology and social psychology known as collective behavior. Even though many thinkers in this field attempt to be objective, they frequently describe collective episodes as if they were the work of mysterious forces. Crowds, for instance, are “fickle,” “irrational,” or “spontaneous,” and their behavior is “unanticipated” or “surprising.” For all their graphic quality, such terms are unsatisfactory. They imply that collective behavior flows from sources beyond empirical explanation. The language of the field, in short, shrouds its very subject in indeterminacy.

  Our aim in this study is to reduce this residue of indeterminacy which lingers in explanations of collective outbursts. Although wild rumors, crazes, panics, riots, and revolutions are surprising, they occur with regularity. They cluster in time; they cluster in certain cultural areas; they occur with greater frequency among certain social groupings—the unemployed, the recent migrant, the adolescent. This skewing in time and in social space invites explanation: Why do collective episodes occur where they do, when they do, and in the ways they do?

  In this introductory chapter we shall merely raise some questions posed by such an inquiry. What is collective behavior? What are its types? How is it to be distinguished from related behavior such as ceremonials? What are the determinants of collective behavior? Are the determinants related to one another in any systematic way? What can a sociological approach contribute to an understanding of collective behavior? Having raised the questions, we shall devote the remainder of the volume to searching for their answers.

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  Human Nature and Collective Behavior

  Papers in Honor of Herbert Blumer

  • Tamotsu Shibutani(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  He cannot simply deduce the observed behavior from prior knowledge of the structured aspects of the situation. As Kurt and Gladys Lang have so rightly emphasized, the study of collective behavior is the study of “collective dynamics” and “collective processes.” 2 But the field of collective behavior deals with many different kinds of phenomena. Crowds, crazes, panics, and social movements are all examples of collective behavior, and as such they have much in common, not the least of which is their deviation from the established forms of social behavior. But they are also different from each other, and one major dimension of differences is the degree to which they lead to an alteration of those orderly and structured features of society to which the sociologist usually directs his attention. The successful social movement brings about a change in the society in which it occurs. Many crowds lead to a response from the agencies of control which has lasting effects, such as new legislation or administrative reorganization. One concern of the student of collective behavior, therefore, is to chart the process of structural change which evolves from these phenomena. 2 Kurt and Gladys Lang, Collective Dynamics (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1961). A more fundamental concern of the student of collective behavior, however, is to examine the common features of all of these various phenomena. The very fact that they are all collective actions which involve deviations from the established forms of social behavior indicates that some new basis of concerted action must be evolved. Whatever the degree of lasting impact on the society in which they occur, therefore, all of these forms of collective behavior involve the development of new collective interpretations of a set of experiences

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  Social Identifications

  A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes

  • Dominic Abrams, Michael A. Hogg(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This powerfully evocative and classic description, from the pen of one of the greatest of all literary commentators on the crowd, not only encompasses the entire range of Collective Behaviour, but describes the same historical events which early crowd theorists (e.g. Gustav Le Bon) employed as their prototype. Zola’s style of description set the mould for what many social psychologists, even to the present day, consider to be the problematic of Collective Behaviour. The extract illustrates many of the themes to be discussed in this chapter: the uniformity and solidarity of the crowd; its unanimity and the poignancy of its symbols; the animal nature of crowd action; its madness, as well as its logic and its wider intergroup context (poverty, oppression, etc.).

  Introduction

  Demonstrations, sit-ins, strikes, and riots are all examples of Collective Behaviour. They come about when people collaborate in order to achieve some objective. That collaboration may not be planned or well organized, but it is goal-directed and often involves large numbers of people. In Chapters 5 and 6 we examined the way that groups form, and the consequences of being in a group for individual behaviour. This chapter takes us on a step, to see how large collections of individuals who are together at the same place at the same time manage to behave in unison as groups.

  We explore two themes in the social psychology of Collective Behaviour. The first, which stems from the ideas of Gustave Le Bon ([1896]1908) assumes that the behaviour of crowds can be explained by extrapolating from processes which are deeply rooted and exist within its individual members (albeit at an unconscious level). We have already described (in Ch. 3 ) Berkowitz’s and Gurr’s extension of frustration-aggression theory to the level of Collective Behaviour. These theorists share with Le Bon and others a belief that any differences which exist between collective and individual behaviour can be explained as resulting from the physical

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  James S. Coleman

  • Dr Jon Clark, Jon Clark(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11

  Methodological Individualism andCollective Behaviour

  Benjamin Zablocki

  It’s amazing to me that the problem of accounting for Collective Behaviour has still not been solved. The phenomenon of elementary Collective Behaviour (riots, panics, expressive crowds, hostile mobs, fads, religious frenzies, etc.) has been kicking around the fringes of sociological theory for a long time. It has always seemed to be one of the potentially easier problems to solve even by the exacting and convoluted standards of the social sciences where every solution seems always to be up for rhetorical grabs. It looked like sociology was on the brink of fully explaining the phenomenon thirty years ago when Roger Brown (1965) threw a startling but brilliant light upon the subject by approaching it for the first time from an internally consistent perspective of rational action theory and methodological individualism. Brown’s approach, though necessarily sketchy, provided a theoretical framework within which a concerted program of research could be launched with the aim of solving the problem of Collective Behaviour. But then, as so often happens in our discipline, the problem was half solved and we lost interest in it and went on to other things.

  A review of James Coleman’s curriculum vitae shows that Coleman has been interested in the problem of Collective Behaviour from the very beginning of his career as a sociologist. Some of his very earliest publications (Coleman, 1957; Coleman and McPhee, 1958; Coleman, 1961c) represent early attempts to understand aspects of crowd behaviour and the closely related phenomenon of the diffusion of innovations. Although Collective Behaviour phenomena have never been at the forefront of Coleman’s research agenda, it is fair to say that the problem has been on his back burner consistently throughout the years. The problem of Collective Behaviour lacks direct policy significance, except perhaps in ‘very interesting times’ and is thus important primarily for its potential contribution to basic theory rather than to applied social research. As Coleman has taken quite seriously his own admonition that sociological research be policy relevant, other more urgent issues have always seemed to direct his attention away from making a concerted attack on the problem of Collective Behaviour. For example, Coleman gives only scant attention to Collective Behaviour in his The Mathematics of Collective Action

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  Essential Psychology

  • Philip Banyard, Christine Norman, Gayle Dillon, Belinda Winder, Philip Banyard, Christine Norman, Gayle Dillon, Belinda Winder(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  It seems at first to push our understanding of what constitutes a group to the extreme: a loosely structured, disorganised aggregate of individuals. And yet, like other, more clearly defined groups, the crowd provides a social context that systematically shapes individuals’ behaviours. This shaping has often been presumed to be a negative pro- cess. Even in ancient times, Plato speculated that, as part of the crowd, individuals became uncivilised and subject to a collective ‘mob’ consciousness. His observations reflect two key characteristics of early accounts of the crowd: (1) they tended to view crowds as negative; and (2) they tended to focus on what happens to individuals as they are taken over by a ‘group mind’. Within psychology, the individualistic scepti- cism discussed above in relation to small groups was also applied to crowds. Indeed, Allport (1924) suggested that crowds should not be studied, due to their unscientific nature. He suggested that crowd behaviour was reducible to the sum of individual actions and was a result of the collection of individual dispositions of crowd mem- bers (a different perspective on the reductionism approach found in approaches to psychological theory). However, the notion of a collective consciousness influenced early psychological accounts of crowds, such as those of Sigmund Freud and William McDougall. Much of this influence can be laid at the feet of the nineteenth-century French writer Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon (1895/1947) wrote extensively on his observations of the crowds involved in the political uprisings at the time of the French Revolution. He argued that, in a crowd, previously civilised individuals became primitive, barbaric and were ruled by animalistic instincts instead of reason. In this situation, he believed individuals became submerged in the crowd, thus losing their self-consciousness and ability to regulate their behaviour.

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  The Myth of the Madding Crowd

  • Clark McPhail(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  McAdam (1982) plotted trends of demonstration gatherings, events, and campaigns in the U.S. civil-rights movement between 1960 and 1965. He suggests that “peaks in movement activity correspond to the introduction of new protest techniques” (1982:165) and, as I noted earlier, represent waves of tactical innovation that spread across states, regions, or nations in a short period of time. Tactical innovations in various forms of collective protest expanded to campaigns and waves: the sit-in campaign of 1960; the jail-in campaign in the winter and the freedom ride campaign in the summer of 1961; the boycotts, rallies, marches, and pickets in the communities of Albany, Georgia, in 1962, Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, Selma, Alabama, in 1965, and, the voter registration campaign in Mississippi in 1964. These are trends of campaigns, events, gatherings, and of sequences of collective behavior.

  Summary and Discussion

  The concepts of crowd and collective behavior have been used interchangeably in the sociological literature for more than a half-century. Neither has proven fruitful. The traditional concept of crowd has been useless because it connoted too much. Traditional conceptions of collective behavior have been equally useless because they denoted too little, more frequently implying an explanatory perspective than specifying, describing, and classifying the social phenomena to be explained.

  The common denominator in most dictionary definitions of crowd is a compact gathering or collection of people. Unfortunately, the additional suggestion or connotation ordinarily conveyed is one of the homogeneity of that collection of people or the unanimity of their behavior, or both. Neither popular nor scholarly usage has allowed for, let alone recognized, variation in behavior across the collection of people at any one point in time, let alone variation across successive points in time. In short, the concept of crowd has prevented recognition of alternation between and variation among collections of people behaving individually and collectively. In failing to recognize this variation and alternation, students of the crowd (and of collective behavior) proceeded to develop explanations for unanimous and homogeneous behaviors, i.e., for phenomena that rarely occur and are short-lived if and when they do.

  People do behave collectively; but what they do together varies greatly in complexity, in duration, and in the proportion of the gathering that actually participates. In one sense, recognition of this variation would appear to make more difficult the task of the student of crowds and collective behavior. But, in fact, the task is made more manageable and therefore simpler. Attempts to describe and explain the crowd have been an impossibly large task to date. By breaking that task into smaller components, the problem is reduced to several tasks, each of more realistic proportions.

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  Crowd Management

  Risk, security and health

  • William O'Toole, Stephen Luke, Jason Brown, Andrew Tatrai, Travis Semmens(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Goodfellow Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Crowd behaviour as different from other human behaviour All of the classic models treat crowd behaviour as something unique and suggest that people behave differently when part of a crowd than they do in other circumstances. More recent observations of crowds in action have undermined this supposition. Adang, in his study of what initiates and escalates collective violence, observed dozens of crowd events and identified that people behave in a way that is meaningful to them, and that the behaviour of individuals within a crowd is not observably uniform. His observations have debunked the myth that individuals in a crowd behave differently than in other circumstances. Schweingr ü ber and Wohlstein suggest that the classic crowd theories have produced seven myths about unique crowd-based human behav-iour that still show up in modern theories and discussions, all of which they have refuted:  Myth of irrationality – the idea that individuals in a crowd lose rational thought  Myth of emotionality – the idea that individuals in a crowd become more emotional  Myth of suggestibility – the idea that individuals in a crowd are more likely to obey or imitate  Myth of destructiveness – that idea that individuals in a crowd are more likely to act violently  Myth of spontaneity – the idea that in a crowd violence occurs more suddenly 5: Crowd Behaviour Theory 63  Myth of anonymity – the idea that individuals in a crowd feel more anonymous  Myth of uniformity/unanimity – the idea that all individual in a crowd act in the same way. With the idea of ‘group mind’ abandoned, more general theories of human behaviour can be applied to crowds. This moves the conversation away from some amorphous ‘group mind’ to the role of the individual in the crowd, and emphasises that understanding the individuals that make up the crowd is necessary to explain crowd behaviour patterns.

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  Protest

  Studies of Collective Behaviour and Social Movements

  • John Lofland(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Collective behavior can be not only emergent or extra-institutional behavior (the rough definition with which chapter 1 opens), but part and parcel of institutionalized life. A central question about gatherings becomes, then, to what degree and in what ways are they “collective behavior” and not merely “collected behavior”? The aborning shift I have described is one of the more recent and technical-scholarly manifestations of the larger and longer-term trend in collective behavior which stresses its similarity to ordinary life along such dimensions as viewing its participants as rational rather than irrational, acting in solidarity rather than in atomized disorganization (a “build-up” versus “break down” stress), obeying (emergent) norms rather than breaking out of the bonds of control, creating new organization rather than reacting to its lack, pursuing goals and policies rather than goalless tension-release and expressive emotionality. However, the shift to which I call attention here is also different from these others in that it continues to view collective behavior as a distinctive phenomenon, unlike the view taken by some other analysts. The shift from “crowds” to “gatherings” partakes of the larger “similarity trend” only in the special sense of highlighting the ubiquity of collective behavior and its appearance in mild forms in the midst of ordinary life and as an integral part of it, HAZARDS OF FORECASTING COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR WAVES: REFLECTIONS ON “THE YOUTH GHETTO” Chapter 3, on the youth ghetto, is one of several ventures I have made into a variety of “predictive sociology,” the effort to be severely analytic about a rapidly changing and current collective behavior circumstance. Five of the analyses in this volume so venture (chs

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