The way people congregate and behave in groups—especially in crowds, mobs, and riots but also extending to fads, rumors, panics, mass publics, and the emergence of organized social movements. Collective behavior has been a prominent subject of research in sociology and social psychology . Crowds and mobs have also played an important role in democratic political thought, inasmuch as they have always been one of the chief outlets of political and social discontent. Mobs have been celebrated by some as a form of direct democracy, but feared by others—especially by many of the liberal thinkers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who viewed mobs as a threat to the social order. The first major examination of the dynamics of crowd behavior was Gustave Le Bon 's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895). Le Bon set the tone for several decades of research by emphasizing the way that crowds submerge individual identity into the “collective mind” and incite primitive, destructive, and antisocial feelings that are normally suppressed in social life. He also discussed the process of social contagion, through which information or sentiments spread from one person to the next.
The sociologist Herbert Blumer sought to account for the obvious differences between types of crowds, based on the different occasions and different ends that motivate them. Blumer differentiated four types: casual crowds, which form spontaneously when something unusual occurs, such as a fire; conventional crowds, which gather for a specific purpose and follow relatively clear norms of behavior, such as audiences and sporting-event publics; expressive crowds, which are characterized by intense feeling that itself becomes the goal of the members, as at religious revivals or rock concerts; and action crowds, which include angry mobs. Action crowds, Blumer noted, are motivated primarily by indignation, anger, and a desire for rapid protest or redress (“Collective Behavior,” 1939). Blumer also revised Le Bon 's theory of social contagion to account for the phenomenon of mass hysteria on the part of dispersed publics. The capacity of the media to mobilize and, in many instances, create such collective phenomena has also been a subject of considerable attention.
Neil J. Smelser made one of the most influential contributions to this field with Theory of Collective Behavior (1963). He stressed three features of collective behavior: the role of structural conduciveness, or the economic and social conditions that legitimate collective and potentially extralegal behavior; precipitating factors, which crystallize collective sentiment, as in the case of the police beating that preceded the Los Angeles riots in 1992; and the counteraction by forces of social control . More recent research into collective behavior has broadly challenged the assumption that mobs and rioters are fundamentally irrational and unorganized. Some of this work has focused on the process of decision making and the emergence of provisional norms in crowd contexts (see Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian , Collective Behavior, 1972). These also emphasize goal-directed rational action and argue that crowds (and more sustained movements) usually act reasonably in accord with particular objectives, resources, and opportunities.
Dictionary of the Social Sciences. © 2002
Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved.
