Collective behavior

Last updated

The expression collective behavior was first used by Franklin Henry Giddings [1] and employed later by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, [2] Herbert Blumer, [3] Ralph H. Turner and Lewis Killian, [4] and Neil Smelser [5] to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure (laws, conventions, and institutions), but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way. Use of the term has been expanded to include reference to cells, social animals like birds and fish, and insects including ants. [6] Collective behavior takes many forms but generally violates societal norms. [7] [8] Collective behavior can be tremendously destructive, as with riots or mob violence, silly, as with fads, or anywhere in between. Collective behavior is always driven by group dynamics, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances. [8]

Defining the field

Turner and Killian were the first sociologists to back their theoretical propositions with visual evidence in the form of photographs and motion pictures of collective behavior in action. [4] Prior to that sociologists relied heavily upon eyewitness accounts, which turned out to be far less reliable than one would hope.

Turner and Killian's approach is based largely upon the arguments of Blumer, who argued that social "forces" are not really forces. The actor is active: He creates an interpretation of the acts of others, and acts on the basis of this interpretation.

Examples

Here are some instances of collective behavior: the Los Angeles riot of 1992, the hula-hoop fad of 1958, the stock market crashes of 1929, and the "phantom gasser" episodes in Virginia in 1933–34 and Mattoon, IL in 1944. [8] [7] The claim that such diverse episodes all belong to a single field of inquiry is a theoretical assertion, and not all sociologists would agree with it. But Blumer and Neil Smelser did agree, as did others, indicating that the formulation has satisfied some leading sociological thinkers.

Four forms

Although there are several other schema that may be used to classify forms of collective behavior the following four categories from Blumer are generally considered useful by most sociologists. [3]

The crowd

Scholars differ about what classes of social events fall under the rubric of collective behavior. In fact, the only class of events which all authors include is crowds. Clark McPhail is one of those who treats crowds and collective behavior as synonyms. Although some consider McPhail's work [9] overly simplistic, [8] his important contribution is to have gone beyond the speculations of others to carry out pioneering empirical studies of crowds. He finds them to form an elaborate set of types.

The classic treatment of crowds is Gustave LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind , [10] in which the author interpreted the crowds of the French Revolution as irrational reversions to animal emotion, and inferred from this that such reversion is characteristic of crowds in general. LeBon believed that crowds somehow induced people to lose their ability to think rationally and to somehow recover this ability once they had left the crowd. He speculated, but could not explain how this might occur. Freud expressed a similar view in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego . [11] Such authors have thought that their ideas were confirmed by various kinds of crowds, one of these being the economic bubble. In Holland, during the tulip mania (1637), the prices of tulip bulbs rose to astronomical heights. An array of such crazes and other historical oddities is narrated in Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds . [12]

At the University of Chicago, Robert Park and Herbert Blumer agreed with the speculations of LeBon and other that crowds are indeed emotional. But to them a crowd is capable of any emotion, not only the negative ones of anger and fear.

A number of authors modify the common-sense notion of the crowd to include episodes during which the participants are not assembled in one place but are dispersed over a large area. Turner and Killian refer to such episodes as diffuse crowds, examples being Billy Graham's revivals, panics about sexual perils, witch hunts and Red scares. Their expanded definition of the crowd is justified if propositions which hold true among compact crowds do so for diffuse crowds as well.

Some psychologists have claimed that there are three fundamental human emotions: fear, joy, and anger. Neil Smelser, John Lofland, [13] and others have proposed three corresponding forms of the crowd: the panic (an expression of fear), the craze (an expression of joy), and the hostile outburst (an expression of anger). Each of the three emotions can characterize either a compact or a diffuse crowd, the result being a scheme of six types of crowds. Lofland has offered the most explicit discussion of these types.

The public

Boom distinguishes the crowd, which expresses a common emotion, from a public, which discusses a single issue. Thus, a public is not equivalent to all of the members of a society. Obviously, this is not the usual use of the word, "public." To Park and Blumer, there are as many publics as there are issues. A public comes into being when discussion of an issue begins, and ceases to be when it reaches a decision on it.

The mass

To the crowd and the public Blumer adds a third form of collective behavior, the mass. It differs from both the crowd and the public in that it is defined not by a form of interaction but by the efforts of those who use the mass media to address an audience. The first mass medium was printing.

The social movement

We change intellectual gears when we confront Blumer's final form of collective behavior, the social movement. He identifies several types of these, among which are active social movements such as the French Revolution and expressive ones such as Alcoholics Anonymous. An active movement tries to change society; an expressive one tries to change its own members.

The social movement is the form of collective behavior which satisfies least well the first definition of it which was offered at the beginning of this article. These episodes are less fluid than the other forms, and do not change as often as other forms do. Furthermore, as can be seen in the history of the labor movement and many religious sects, a social movement may begin as collective behavior but over time become firmly established as a social institution.

For this reason, social movements are often considered a separate field of sociology. The books and articles about them are far more numerous than the sum of studies of all the other forms of collective behavior put together. Social movements are considered in many Wikipedia articles, and an article on the field of social movements as a whole would be much longer than this essay.

The study of collective behavior spun its wheels for many years, but began to make progress with the appearance of Turner and Killian's "Collective Behavior" [4] and Smelser's Theory of Collective Behavior. [5] Both books pushed the topic of collective behavior back into the consciousness of American sociologists and both theories contributed immensely to our understanding of collective behavior. [8] [7] Social disturbances in the U. S. and elsewhere in the late '60s and early '70s inspired another surge of interest in crowds and social movements. These studies presented a number of challenges to the armchair sociology of earlier students of collective behavior.

Theories developed to explain

Social scientists have developed theories to explain crowd behavior.

  1. Contagion theory – the Contagion Theory was formulated by French thinker Gustave Le Bon. According to Le Bon crowds exert a hypnotic influence over their members. Shielded by their anonymity, large numbers of people abandon personal responsibility and surrender to the contagious emotions of the crowd. A crowd thus assumes a life of its own, stirring up emotions and driving people toward irrational, even violent action. [10] Le Bon's Theory, although one of the earliest explanations of crowd behavior, is still accepted by many people outside of sociology. [14] However, critics argue that the "collective mind" has not been documented by systematic studies. Furthermore, although collective behavior may involve strong emotions, such feelings are not necessarily irrational. Turner and Killian argue convincingly that the "contagion" never actually occurs and participants in collective behavior do not lose their ability to think rationally. [4]
  2. Convergence theory – whereas the Contagion Theory states that crowds cause people to act in a certain way, Convergence theory states that people who want to act in a certain way come together to form crowds. Developed by Floyd Allport [15] and later expanded upon by Neil Miller and John Dollard as "Learning Theory", [16] the central argument of all convergence theories is that collective behavior reveals the otherwise hidden tendencies of the individuals who take part in the episode. It asserts that people with similar attributes find other like-minded persons with whom they can release these underlying tendencies. People sometimes do things in a crowd that they would not have the courage to do alone because crowds can diffuse responsibility but the behavior itself is claimed to originate within the individuals. Crowds, in addition, can intensify a sentiment simply by creating a critical mass of like-minded people.
  3. Emergent-norm theory – according to sociologists Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian, [4] crowds begin as collectivities composed of people with mixed interests and motives. Especially in the case of less stable crowds—expressive, acting and protest crowds—norms may be vague and changing, as when one person decides to break the glass windows of a store and others join in and begin looting merchandise. When people find themselves in a situation that is vague, ambiguous, or confusing new norms "emerge" on the spot and people follow those emergent norms, which may be at odds with normal social behavior. Turner and Killian further argue that there are several different categories of participants, all of whom follow different patterns of behavior due to their differing motivations.
  4. Value-added theory – professor Neil Smelser argues that collective behavior is actually a sort of release valve for built-up tension ("strain") within the social system, community, or group. [5] If the proper determinants are present then collective behavior becomes inevitable. Conversely, if any of the key determinants are not present no collective behavior will occur unless and until the missing determinants fall into place. These are primarily social, although physical factors such as location and weather may also contribute to or hinder the development of collective behavior.
  5. Complex Adaptive Systems theory – Dutch scholar Jaap van Ginneken claims that contagion, convergence and emergent norms are just instances of the synergy, emergence and autopoiesis or self-creation of patterns and new entities typical for the newly discovered meta-category of complex adaptive systems. [17] This also helps explain the key role of salient details and path-dependence in rapid shifts.
  6. Shared intentionality theory – Cognitive psychologist professor Michael Tomasello developed the psychological construct of Shared intentionality through his insights into cognition evolution and, specifically, the knowledge development about the contribution of Shared intentionality to the formation of social reality. [18] Shared Intentionality provides unaware processes in mother-child dyads during social learning when young organisms can only manifest simple reflexes. [19] It increases the cognitive performance of children indwelling with mothers who know the correct answer. This interaction proceeds without communication within the dyad using sensory cues. Professor Igor Val Danilov argues that this performance succeeds due to sharing an essential stimulus during a single cognitive task in the shared ecological context. [20] Furthermore, research shows that Shared intentionality can appear even in groups of more mature organisms due to their physiological synchrony and group dynamics. [21] [22] [23] [24] Therefore, this interaction can provide subliminal compliance of the participants to the group decisions, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances. The hypothesis of neurobiological processes occurring during Shared intentionality explains how organisms can share relevant sensory stimuli without communication within the group using sensory cues. [25] [26]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perception</span> Interpretation of sensory information

Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.

Categorization is a type of cognition involving conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience, such as objects, events, or ideas. It involves the abstraction and differentiation of aspects of experience by sorting and distinguishing between groupings, through classification or typification on the basis of traits, features, similarities or other criteria that are universal to the group. Categorization is considered one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and it is studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognition</span> Act or process of knowing

Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crowd psychology</span> Branch of social psychology

Crowd psychology is a branch of social psychology that deals with the ways in which the psychology of a crowd is different from the psychology of the individual persons who are in the crowd. The field of crowd psychology enquires into the behaviors and thought processes of both the individual members of the crowd and the crowd as a collective social entity. The behavior of a crowd is much influenced by deindividuation, a person's loss of responsibility, and the person's impression of the universality of behavior, both of which conditions increase in magnitude with size of the crowd. Notable theorists in crowd psychology include Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, and Sigmund Freud.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knowledge transfer</span> Sharing knowledge for problem solving

Knowledge transfer refers to transferring an awareness of facts or practical skills from one entity to another. The particular profile of transfer processes activated for a given situation depends on (a) the type of knowledge to be transferred and how it is represented and (b) the processing demands of the transfer task. From this perspective, knowledge transfer in humans encompasses an expertise from different disciplines: psychology, cognitive anthropology, anthropology of knowledge, communication studies and media ecology.

Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crowd</span> Group who have gathered for a common purpose or intent

Generally speaking, a crowd is defined as a group of people that have gathered for a common purpose or intent such as at a demonstration, a sports event, or during looting, or may simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area. The term "the crowd" may sometimes refer to the lower orders of people in general.

The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.

Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.

Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch TV, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.

Neil Joseph Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social movement theory</span> Interdisciplinary social study

Social movement theory is an interdisciplinary study within the social sciences that generally seeks to explain why social mobilization occurs, the forms under which it manifests, as well as potential social, cultural, political, and economic consequences, such as the creation and functioning of social movements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fad</span> Collective behavior that achieves intense short-lived popularity and then fades away

A fad, trend, or craze is any form of collective behavior that develops within a culture, a generation or social group in which a group of people enthusiastically follow an impulse for a short time period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collective mental state</span> Mental state which is shared by individuals in a group, organization, or society

Collective mental state is generally a literary or legal term, mostly used in sociology and philosophy, to refer to the condition of someone's being-state when around others. An assessment of a collective mental state includes a description of thought processes, memory, emotions, mood, cognitive state, and energy levels, including the meta overlay of interactions between individuals.

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.

Infant cognitive development is the first stage of human cognitive development, in the youngest children. The academic field of infant cognitive development studies of how psychological processes involved in thinking and knowing develop in young children. Information is acquired in a number of ways including through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and language, all of which require processing by our cognitive system. However, cognition begins through social bonds between children and caregivers, which gradually increase through the essential motive force of Shared intentionality. The notion of Shared intentionality describes unaware processes during social learning at the onset of life when organisms in the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development do not maintain communication via the sensory system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social contagion</span> Spontaneous spread of behavior or emotions among a group

Social contagion involves behaviour, emotions, or conditions spreading spontaneously through a group or network. The phenomenon has been discussed by social scientists since the late 19th century, although much work on the subject was based on unclear or even contradictory conceptions of what social contagion is, so exact definitions vary. Some scholars include the unplanned spread of ideas through a population as social contagion, though others prefer to class that as memetics. Generally social contagion is understood to be separate from the collective behaviour which results from a direct attempt to exert social influence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collective intentionality</span> Intentionality that occurs when two or more individuals undertake a task together

In the philosophy of mind, collective intentionality characterizes the intentionality that occurs when two or more individuals undertake a task together. Examples include two individuals carrying a heavy table up a flight of stairs or dancing a tango.

In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT) says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world. The EMT proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a cognitive process and in that way function as extensions of the mind itself. Examples of such objects are written calculations, a diary, or a PC; in general, it concerns objects that store information. The EMT considers the mind to encompass every level of cognition, including the physical level.

Shared intentionality is a concept in psychology that describes the human capacity to engage with the psychological states of others. According to conventional wisdom in cognitive sciences, shared intentionality supports the development of everything from cooperative interactions and knowledge assimilation to moral identity and cultural evolution that provides building societies, being a pre-requisite of social reality formation.

References

  1. ↑ Giddings, Franklin Henry. 1908. Sociology . New York: Columbia University Press.
  2. ↑ Park, Robert E. and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  3. 1 2 Blumer, Herbert. 1939. Collective Behavior. In Robert E. Park, Ed., An Outline of the Principles of Sociology. New York: Barnes and Noble. pp. 219-280.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Turner, Ralph H., and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behavior, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 1957 1st ed., 2d ed., 1972; 3d. ed. 1987; 4th ed. 1993.
  5. 1 2 3 Smelser, Neil J. Theory of Collective Behavior, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1962.
  6. ↑ Gordon, Deborah M. (March 11, 2014). "The Ecology of Collective Behavior". PLOS Biol. 12 (3): e1001805. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001805 . PMC   3949665 . PMID   24618695.
  7. 1 2 3 Miller, David L., Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000 2d ed., 1985.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Locher, David A., Collective Behavior, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.
  9. ↑ McPhail, Clark. The Myth of the Madding Crowd, New York, Aldine de Gruyter, 1991.
  10. 1 2 LeBon, Gustave. 1896. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing Company.
  11. ↑ Freud, S. (1921). Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse. Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
    English translation: Freud, Sigmund (1922). Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego. Translated by James Strachey. London, Vienna: International Psycho-Analytical Press.
  12. ↑ MacKay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , 1841.
  13. ↑ Lofland, John (1985). Protest - Studies of Collective Behaviour and Social Movements. Routledge. ISBN   9780887388767.
  14. ↑ Castellano, C.; Fortunato, S., & Loreto, V. (2009). Statistical physics of social dynamics. Rev Mod Phys 81(2): 591–646.
  15. ↑ Allport, Floyd. 1924. Social Psychology. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, The Riverside Press.
  16. ↑ Miller, Neil and John Dollard. 1941. Social Learning and Imitation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  17. ↑ Jaap van Ginneken, Collective behavior and public opinion – Rapid shifts in opinion and communication, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003.
  18. ↑ Tomasello, M. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 2019.
  19. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor; Mihailova, Sandra (2022). "A New Perspective on Assessing Cognition in Children through Estimating Shared Intentionality". Journal of Intelligence. 10 (2): 21. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence10020021 . ISSN   2079-3200. PMC   9036231 . PMID   35466234.
  20. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor (February 17, 2023). "Theoretical Grounds of Shared Intentionality for Neuroscience in Developing Bioengineering Systems". OBM Neurobiology. 7 (1): 156. doi: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2301156 .
  21. ↑ Val Danilov I, Mihailova S. Empirical Evidence of Shared Intentionality: Towards Bioengineering Systems Development. OBM Neurobiology 2023; 7(2): 167; doi:10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2302167. https://www.lidsen.com/journals/neurobiology/neurobiology-07-02-167
  22. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor; Mihailova, Sandra; Svajyan, Araksia (2022). "Computerized Assessment of Cognitive Development in Neurotypical and Neurodivergent Children". OBM Neurobiology. 6 (3): 1–8. doi: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2203137 .
  23. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor (2022). "A Bioengineering System for Assessing Children's Cognitive Development by Computerized Evaluation of Shared Intentionality". 2022 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI). pp. 1583–1590. doi:10.1109/CSCI58124.2022.00284. ISBN   979-8-3503-2028-2 . Retrieved November 16, 2023.
  24. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor; Svajyan, Araksia; Mihailova, Sandra (2023). "A New Computer-Aided Method for Assessing Children's Cognition in Bioengineering Systems for Diagnosing Developmental Delay". OBM Neurobiology. 7 (4): 1–15. doi: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2304189 .
  25. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor (2023). "Shared Intentionality Modulation at the Cell Level: Low-Frequency Oscillations for Temporal Coordination in Bioengineering Systems". OBM Neurobiology. 7 (4): 1–17. doi: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2304185 .
  26. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor (2023). "Low-Frequency Oscillations for Nonlocal Neuronal Coupling in Shared Intentionality Before and After Birth: Toward the Origin of Perception". OBM Neurobiology. 7 (4): 1–17. doi: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2304192 .

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.