Collective Behavior: Features, Theories, and Dynamics
Collective Behavior Features
Basic Features:
- Emerging: Spontaneous, expressive, informal, unstructured, unplanned, improvised, unpredictable.
- Extra: Not specified by the culture, unconventional, not according to established rules, membership, roles, and objectives ill-defined, emerging standards generator.
Secondary Features:
- Changing and Unstable: Appears and rapidly changing, versatile, fluid, ephemeral, transient.
- Emotional: Arousal as a reaction to a problematic situation or stress. People become more influential.
- Affects a Large Number: The number is related to the amplitude of the group affected by the problem situation.
Lofland’s Components of Collective Behavior
- Cognitive Component: Refers to how people are defining the situation.
- Emotional Component: Increasing level of emotional arousal in the participants.
- Action Component: The action defined by participants and observers as out of the ordinary.
- Physical Component: The collective behavior requires the suspension of everyday life actions for a large number of people.
- Temporal Component: The proportion of a community that suspends the attitude of everyday life to varying degrees and experiencing emotional arousal over time.
The first three components maintain an interactive relationship: an increase in emotional arousal contributes to labeling the situation as extraordinary; emotional arousal facilitates the situation thawing, and new behaviors emerge.
The number of people is important for one side that creates a sense of anonymity; on the other hand, that becomes more intense social facilitation processes, the impact of leadership and emotional arousal.
The time factor is an indicator of the intensity and persistence of behavior.
Types of Behavior and Groups
Conventional Behavior: It is typical of established groups that were formally governed by established rules; have the force of tradition.
Communities: The behavior is not addressed by cultural norms, is unstructured, lack of procedures for selecting its members, no roles or rules to elect their leaders.
Group: People who are in interaction and whose interaction is affected by the sense that they form a unit.
Community: Relatively disorganized group not defined by formal procedures for selecting its members to set goals, choose leaders and make decisions.
Organization: Formal group governed by certain rules allowing members to identify, define objectives, choose leaders and make decisions.
Multitude: Collectivity whose members are in mutual presence, immediate and face to face.
Mass: Community of people caring for a common object but did not find each other in physical proximity and immediate. May involve large segments of the population * feelings: hostility, fear, joy, and sadness.
Social Movement: Is a community or disorganized motion in the interface, largely informal, and a sense of unity that makes possible a common or collective non-institutional. It works with continuity, which involves some degree of organization, strategy, commitment, … while enabling continuity of group identity and enables the development of beliefs and values. Aims of social change or resistance to it.
Touraine’s Principles of Social Movements
Touraine: Every movement is built on three principles.
- Principle of Identity: Refers to those who define themselves as participants.
- Principle of Opposition: Specifies who is the enemy we are fighting the move.
- Principle of Totality: Worldview seeks to impose.
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Collective Behavior
Psychoanalysis / / / Homo irrationalis: Their behavior is driven by emotions and unconscious motives. The ultimate source of these impulses is libido.
Contributions: Eric Hoffer fanaticism of the masses. / / Zimbardo deindividuation. / / Le Bon, Freud, Jung’s collective unconscious.
Causal Attribution, Cognitive Variables, and Collective Action
-We tend to explain what happens to a person based on their individual characteristics rather than to attribute it to situational factors (fundamental attribution error).
-Without a homogeneous and intense interaction is unlikely that a person recognizes that their private disorders reflect public problems.
-Those who hold the opposite belief the world just may be more likely to make attributions to the system.
Relative Deprivation Theory: Attempts to explain the feeling of discontent that can lead to collective action. He argues that people evaluate what they have in relation to their reference groups. If you get less than they expect it as unfair and rife with discontent.
- Selfish or personal Deprivation
- Deprivation colectiva. fraternal or
-When deprivation is more collective likely to make external attributions.
Social Identity Theory: Tajfel believes that individuals change their ways when they are members of a group. Their experiments showed that simply assigning a subject to a group or category to the emergence of a new type of behavior motivated by the desire to further the interests of the group you feel a member.
Symbolic Interactionism: Social change introduced by the collective behavior is seen as part of a normal process of constant renewal of society. / /-The individual is seen as a conscious actor who built his behavior through symbolic representations of self and what others expect. / / It emphasizes the role of interaction in the construction of meaning in the coordination of individual behavior.
Blumer’s Stages of Collective Behavior
Blumer:
- If there is social unrest, life goes according to the norms and social roles, and there is no collective behavior.
- If you generate social unrest, this is a sign of the collapse of normative social order, creating favorable conditions for the emergence of collective behavior.
- The behavior becomes erratic and without a precise goal, extending an excitement that leads to exaggerated views, biased perceptions, and rumors. Increased irritability and suggestibility.
Reward-Cost Model of Berk
Principle of expected utility maximization: An ideal decision-maker will choose that action that provides the best result.
Process Followed by Participants in a Crowd to Make Decisions:
- Looking information.
- The use to predict what they consider their ocurrirá.
- Action.
- Options ranked in order of probable outcomes of different acciones.
- Choose a type and action that minimizes costs.
Action Probability = [(Ra-R) (S)] Ra = anticipated outcome of the action, R = result of inaction. S = propabilidad support
Olson’s Theory of Collective Action
Olson examines the importance of costs and rewards to explain individual and organizational involvement in social movement activity. / /-Examines the variety of resources to be mobilized, the linkages between social movements and other groups, the dependence movements relative to external support and the tactics used by authorities to control or incorporate movements. / /-As the social movements provide collective goods, few people want to suffer alone the costs of working to get them.
- Real Groups: Those who can benefit from a given group, whether it helps pay the cost of their provision.
- Incentives Targeted: A single actor who can win or lose and influence the actor contribute to collective action.
- Stars: Individuals or organizations with the capacity for decision-making and social control.
- Collective Action: The struggle for collective goods, which involves the organization of the actors and collective mobilization.
- Actors Groups: Organizations and formal organizations whose primary purpose is to carry out such struggles.
-According to Marx, the basic force that drives society and history is the clash of interests, and therefore, the conflict is the key to addressing social change. The conflict results in a struggle for economic resources.
Political Process Theory
In times of political instability, there is an opportunity for those with opposing interests may challenge the established power.
Political Opportunity Structure: The degree to which some groups are likely to gain access to power and manipulation of the political system.