Collective behavior

Collective behavior is a specialized term in sociology. The term was first used by Robert E. Park, and employed definitively by Herbert Blumer, 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. Some examples of collective behavior include religious revivals, a panic in a burning theatre, an outbreak of swastika painting, a change in popular preferences in toothpaste, the Russian Revolution, and a sudden widespread interest in body piercing. Since such events occur when social prescriptions are not clear, they exemplify neither conformity nor deviance.

The claim that this set of seemingly diverse episodes constitutes a single field of inquiry is a theoretical assertion which not all sociologists will agree with. However, its usage by Blumer and Smelser shows that the formulation must satisfy some sociological minds.

Four forms of collective behavior
Most of the examples of collective behavior mentioned above are instances of crowd behavior. The classic treatment of crowds is Gustave LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), in which LeBon, a frightened aristocrat, interpreted the crowds of the French Revolution as irrational reversions to animal emotion, and]] infers from this that such reversion is characteristic of crowds in general. Freud expressed a similar view in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922).

At the University of Chicago, Robert Park and Herbert Blumer saw crowds as emotional, but as capable of any emotion, not only the negative ones of anger and fear.

All of these writers acknowledge that there are crowds in which the participants are not assembled in one place. Turner and Killian refer to such episodes as diffuse crowds, examples being stock market booms, panics about sexual perils, and "Red scares."

Some psychologists have suggested that there are three fundamental human emotions, fear, joy, and anger, and Smelser and others have proposed three corresponding forms of the crowd: the panic, in which fear is the dominant emotion, the craze, which is an expression of joy, and the hostile outburst, which is characterized by anger.

Each of the three emotions can characterize either a compact or a diffuse crowd, so that there are six types of crowds in this scheme.

Park distinguished the crowd, which expresses a common emotion from a public, in which a single issue is discussed. A public exists for every issue being discussed at a particular time, so that there are as many publics as there are issues, each public coming into being when its issue is first raised and going out of being when the issue is resolved.

To the crowd and the public, Blumer added a third form of collective behavior, the mass. It differs from both the crowd and the public in that it is not defined by a form of interaction but by presentation from the mass media to an audience. Before modern times, communication in the mass took the form of rumor. The invention of printing made masses more common, and they have become more prominent still with the invention of as each of the other mass media.

The messages from the mass media is an attempt to persuade the mass to choose something which is offered, such as some brand of refrigerator. The mass acts not by the expression of a common emotion as does the crowd, nor by discussion as does the public, but by the simultaneous and independent action of the participants. Their aggregated choices can have powerful effects on society, as when a popular TV show leads many people to use the bathroom at the same time, so that bond issues have to be floated to increase sewage disposal facilities.

Contrary to Blumer, evidence confirms the common sense view that consumers do not act independently of one another but frequently discuss their choices. For this reason, Turner and Killian suggest that the mass is best thought of as what Max Weber calls an "ideal type" -- not an accurate description of empirical cases, but a concept which is useful in interpreting particular events insofar as they approximate it. Actually, most or all terms in the field refer to ideal types; there are many mixed cases.

We change intellectual gears when we confront Blumer's final form of collective behavior, the social movement. Some examples include the French Revolutions, the movement for the adoption of a World Calendar, and Alcoholics Anonymous.

Social movemements typically have a structure and persistrence which distinguishes them from the other three forms of collective behavior, and for this reason they are often considered to be a separate topic.

There have never been many specialists in collective behavior, and these few have typically been students of Park and Blumer at Chicago, or, more recently, of Blumer and Smelser at Berkeley. Thus, collective behavior has been a school of thought as well as a subfield of sociology.

The study of collective behavior spun its wheels for many years, until Neil Smelser's Theory of Collectiove Behavior (1962) and social disturbances in the U. S. and elsewhere in the late 60's and early 70's prompted a renewal of interest in the field. Out of this interest has come a number of empirical challenges to the armchair sociology of earlier students of collective behavior.

Richard Berk uses game theory to suggest that even a panic in a burning theater can reflect rational calculation. If members of the audience decide that it is more rational to run to the exits than to walk, the result may look like an animal-like stampede without in fact being irrational.

In a series of empirical studies of assemblies of people, Clark McPhail (The Myth of the Madding Crowd) argues that such assemblies vary along a number of dimensions, and that traditional stereotypes of emotionality and unanimity often do not describe what happens.