Lecture 13 - Social Psych Show Collective behavior I. Intro. A. Numerous episodes labeled "psychic epidemics, collective seizures, group outbursts, mass delusions, crazes," have been recorded. Throughout the world, people have thrown themselves into social unrest, riots, manias, fads, panics, lynchings, religious revivals. B. Social Psychologists term such phenomena collective behavior - relatively spontaneous and unstructured ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that develop within a group as a result of interaction among participants. It is not governed by traditional, established norms and hence is not institutionalized. C. Social movements are somewhat similar - but have purposeful direction and a good deal of internal order. Social movement = more or less persistent, organized effort on the part of a relatively large number of people to bring about or resist social change. D. Smelser's formulation is borrowed from the economists notion of "value added". As raw ore, iron can be made into many things. Once converted into thin sheets of steel, uses are limited. Cutting further limits its uses. Each step adds value, but also cuts down on other options. Collective behavior is like this - as each successive determinant is added, the range of possible final outcomes is narrowed. II. Elements of collective behavior, social movements (Smelser) A. Structural conduciveness - refers to the broad social conditions that are necessary for an episode of collective behavior to occur. EX: To have a financial panic, you need a money market in which assets can be freely and quickly exchanged. EX: Social networks helped spread "bug panic" B. Structural strain - exists where various aspects of a system are in some way "out of joint" with each other. War, econ crises, catastrophes, etc. can create stress that makes people susceptible to courses of action not defined by existing social arrangements. They experience social malaise - a feeling of pervasive dissatisfaction and disgruntlement. EX: Women in the bug epidemic were under greater econ pressure than others. EX: 1890s ghost dance - had hypnotic trances, believed a savior was coming - Native American culture had been devastated by whites. TWO DIFFERING EXPLANATIONS AS TO THE NATURE OF THE CONDITIONS THAT PRECIPITATE ACTION. 1. Relative deprivation - gap exists between what people want and what seems attainable. EX: During WWII, promotions in the air force were rapid and widespread, within military police they were slow and piecemeal. Yet air force people were much more frustrated. a. CAUSES: 1. rising expectations. As a group experiences improvements, it may also experience a rise in expectations - the two may not keep up. EX: Black riots of the 1960s. Early gains of civil rights movements led blacks to believe they would gain a greater share of America's good things - but even though they could get in the stores, they still had no money to buy the goodies. 2. J-curve hypothesis, or "rise and drop" - Davies found that rebellions and revolutions are likely to occur when a prolonged period of econ and social improvement is followed by a short period of reversal - people fear ground gained will be lost. b. Tie-ins with other theory. 1. Frustration-aggression - indiv. frustrated in the pursuit of their goals are thought to be susceptible to agressive behaviors. 2. Its focus on the discrepancy between expectations and reality ties in with equity theory, just-world formulations. 3. Its emphasis on the discrepancy between expectations and reality, and people's efforts to close the gap, reminds us of the central interestes of cognitive balance theory. 2. Resource mobilization. a. Some social scientists view social discontent as more or less a given, and thus endemic within all modern socieities. They see movements forming as a result of long-term changes in group resources, organization, opportunites for collective action b. This viewpoint says collective action is seldom a viable option for deprived groups, because they lack the resources to challenge elites. When deprived groups do mobilize, it is typically due to the infusion of outside help and the cooptation of institutional resources (e.g. private foundaions, gov. agencies, mass media, universities). EX: 1960s are seen as the product of professionals and college students with discretionary time schedules and income, liberal institutions with slack resources, and a pervasive, co-opted mass media. C. The growth and spread of a generalized belief. 1. Structural strain alone does not produce collective action - the strain must be interpreted in a meaningful way by the potential participants. A generalized belief provides people with answers to their stressful circumstances. It provides a. a diagnosis of the forces and agents that cause the strain. b. a response or program for coping with the strain. EX: Bug epidemic - generalized belief in an insect invasion from a shipment of English cloth provided a credible "cause" for symptoms 2. Answers are often provided thru ideology - a set of shared definitions that provided interpretations and solutions to what is felt to be an unsatisfactory social condition. FUNCTIONS: a. Provided new categories to interpret sense of tension, frustration, stress. EX: Tangible enemies > Communist, Yankees, Jews. Indictment of existing social arrangements > capitalism, racism, chauvinism. b. Provides utopian vision of a new society c. Provides dogma - a certainty regarding the truth - that knits people together. d. Provides conceptual filter that permits only positive reinforcement and reinterprets negative feedback in a fashion supportive of the groups position. e. Sharpens polarization between outsiders and insiders f. Provides sense of personal power and control over one's destiny. D. Precipitating factors. Behavior needs to be touched off by an event - this event creates, sharpens, and exaggerates other factors. Provides "concrete evidence" of the evil forces at work. E. Mobilization of participants for action. Participants must be brought into action. 1. Interpersonal relationships frequently play a critical part. Have links to movement members through a preexisting interpersonal bond. Individuals commonly lack ties to other social networks that are antagonisitc to the movement and its ideology. 2. Recruitment can occur without preestablished social ties. One study found 42% of the initial contacts between members of the Hare Krishna and later converts took place in public places. Also, some people actively search for meaningful encounters, identity change. F. Operation of social control. Social control = techniques through which governing elites prevent, interrupt, deflect, inhibit the accumulation of other determinants of collective behavior. 1. Some controls seek to minimize conduciveness and strain - to prevent discontent from arising (e.g. welfare programs). 2. Some try to repress collective behavior after it has begun (police measures, imprisonment). III. Crowd behavior. Crowd = audiences, rallies, mobs, riots, panics. People are sufficiently close together to influence their behavior. A. Contagion theory. Le Bon says crowd assimilates members, produces a psychic unity. Normal, decent people are transformed under crowd influence. 1. Anonymity - lose unique personalities, sense of responsibility. Deindividuation occurs 2. Contagion - We involuntarily catch diseases from one another - behavior is said to spread same way. 3. Suggestibility - people uncritically accept the directives addressed to them - are very susceptible to the influence of others. Group polarization, risky shifts can occur. B. Convergence theory. Says crowd consists of a highly unrepresentative group of people who come together because they share certain predispositions. Angry, agression prone individuals are often drawn to hostile crowds. EX: Football games, parties. C. Emergent-norm theory. Emphasizes the differences in motives, attitudes, and behaviors that charactertize crowd members - tries to explain how the illusion of uniformity and unanimity develops. Draws fro Sherif's, Asch's work 1. Have ambiguous situations. Crowd members must evolve new standards in ill-defined settings. 2. Behavior of a few conspicuous, active members becomes perceived as the dominant course of action. 3. Crowd members then try to enforce the new norm, convert others to it, inhibit contradictory behavior. When dissenters remain silent, they contribute to the illusion of unanimity. IV. Social problems A. Defn: a condition that a considerable number of people believe exists in their society and that they do not like. It is a matter of social defn., and lacks objective existence - people attribute problem status to certain circumstances and assign an unfavorable meaning to them. No circumstances or behavior constitute a social problem unless people define them as such. EX: womans movement - feminist movement faded after the 1920s and has since been revived. B. If it is not to die aborning, problem needs to acquire legitimacy. While many social problems are viewed as harmful by different sets of people, few achieve social endorsement and corrective action. EX: Unearned profits from owning land (Henry George, 19th century); devastating social effects of the American Highway system; danger to human health from artificial food additives 1. Many individuals dedicate their lives to agitation that never secures a genuine public hearing. Problems they stress are viewed as insignificant, unworthy of consideration, merely the shouting of crackpots and subversives. 2. Many budding social problems are choked off, others avoided, ignored, have to fight their way to respectability (racism, sexism), and other sa re rushed along the road to legitimacy by strong and influential backing (energy crisis). 3. As social problem wins legitimacy, sponsors are no longer simply protest groups, but bonafide spokespeople for a constituency. C. Official public policy. 1. If social problem secures social legitimacy, then maneuvering, manipulation, give-and-take, diplomacy and bargaining take place to accomodate diverse interests. Official agencies often capture and monopolize the problem, neutralizing or eliminating the original protestors. Protest group often thinks they've been "sold out". Social problem becomes restructured. 2. Problems also become de-politicized by defining it as a medical condition or illness requiring professional treatment. EX: Alcoholism. Soviet Union has used the ideology of mental illness to put political dissidents into psychiatric centers. Medicalization depoliticizes deviance by removing it from the realm of ethical discussion - once the labels of "health" and "illness" have been successfully applied to a behavior, any discussion of desirability or tolerability becomes irrelevant, illogical. D. Second-order consequences. Social intervention has wide-ranging consequences beyond its primary intent. Sometimes one social problem replaces another. EX: Prohibition destroyed saloons, but contributed to the rise of organized crime. In lengthening human life span, medical science has created an aged population with increased needs for medical and welfare services. New problems must then be attacked. How is collective behavior related to social movement?Collective behavior describes the actions, thoughts and feelings of a relatively temporary and unstructured group of people. In contrast a social movement is a large ongoing group of people engaged in organized behavior designed to bring about or resist change in society.
What factors are needed for a social movement?The authors identify three factors critical to social movements: political opportunity, organizational capacity, and framing ability. They look at social movements as politics by other means, often the only means open to relatively powerless challenging groups.
What are 3 characteristics of collective behaviour?There are three primary forms of collective behavior: the crowd, the mass, and the public. It takes a fairly large number of people in close proximity to form a crowd (Lofland 1993). Examples include a group of people attending an Ani DiFranco concert, tailgating at a Patriots game, or attending a worship service.
What conditions must be in place for collective behavior to occur?Value-added theory argues that collective behavior results when several conditions exist, including structural strain, generalized beliefs, precipitating factors, and lack of social control. All these conditions must exist for collective behavior to occur.
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