Collective behavior is relatively spontaneous, loosely structured action by people who are responding to the same thing at the same time — and it is not one thing. Sociologists sort it with two questions: are these people in the same place, and what, if anything, do they share? Tap each form and watch the gathering rearrange itself.
Five kinds of crowd
Collective behaviortap a kind of crowd to begin
Blumer’s four crowds, plus one — tap one (or tap the diagram)
How this crowd behaves
Read this crowd through a paradigm
The crowd does not have a mind. Gustave Le Bon’s contagion theory (1895) claimed crowds hypnotize their members into a single irrational “collective mind.” Sociologists reject it: crowds are mixed, most members never act, and Le Bon wrote as a frightened critic of the masses. Convergence theory answers him from the other side — the crowd does not create the disposition, people who already share one converge. Emergent norm theory is the account most sociologists use today.
How an ordinary gathering becomes an acting crowd
Mass behavior — collective behavior among people who are not together
How this form behaves
Crowd vs. mass. Herbert Blumer’s line: a crowd is people in one another’s presence; a mass is a large number of people who are physically dispersed and anonymous to one another but attending to the same object. A public is the arguing kind of mass — dispersed people concerned with the same issue who do not agree about it.