Editing Collective behavior (section)

== Examples ==
Here are some instances of collective behavior: the Los Angeles riot of 1992, the hula-hoop fad of 1958, the stock market crashes of 1929, and the "[[Mad Gasser of Mattoon|phantom gasser]]" episodes in Virginia in 1933–34 and Mattoon, IL in 1944.{{r|Locher2002|Miller2000}} The claim that such diverse episodes all belong to a single field of inquiry is a theoretical assertion, and not all sociologists would agree with it.  But Blumer and [[Neil Smelser]] did agree, as did others, indicating that the formulation has satisfied some leading sociological thinkers.

===Four forms===
Although there are several other schema that may be used to classify forms of collective behavior the following four categories from Blumer are generally considered useful by most sociologists.{{r|Blumer1939}}

====The crowd====
Scholars differ about what classes of social events fall under the rubric of collective behavior.  In fact, the only class of events which all authors include is crowds.  
[[Clark McPhail]] is one of those who treats crowds and collective behavior as synonyms.  Although some consider McPhail's work{{r|McPhail1991}} overly simplistic,{{r|Locher2002}} his important contribution is to have gone beyond the speculations of others to carry out pioneering empirical studies of crowds.  He finds them to form an elaborate set of types.

The classic treatment of crowds is [[Gustave LeBon]], ''[[The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind]]'',{{r|LeBon1896}} in which the author interpreted the crowds of the French Revolution as irrational reversions to animal emotion, and inferred from this that such reversion is characteristic of crowds in general.  LeBon believed that crowds somehow induced people to lose their ability to think rationally and to somehow recover this ability once they had left the crowd. He speculated, but could not explain how this might occur.  [[Freud]] expressed a similar view in ''[[Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego]]''.{{r|Freud1922}}  Such authors have thought that their ideas were confirmed by various kinds of crowds, one of these being the [[economic bubble]].  In Holland, during the [[tulip mania]] (1637), the prices of tulip bulbs rose to astronomical heights.  An array of such crazes and other historical oddities is narrated in Charles MacKay's ''[[Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds]]''.{{r|MacKay1841}}

At the [[University of Chicago]], [[Robert E. Park|Robert Park]] and Herbert Blumer agreed with the speculations of LeBon and other that crowds are indeed emotional.  But to them a crowd is capable of any emotion, not only the negative ones of anger and fear.

A number of authors modify the common-sense notion of the crowd to include episodes during which the participants are not assembled in one place but are dispersed over a large area.  Turner and Killian refer to such episodes as ''diffuse'' crowds, examples being [[Billy Graham]]'s revivals, panics about sexual perils, witch hunts and Red scares.  Their expanded definition of the crowd is justified if propositions which hold true among compact crowds do so for diffuse crowds as well.

Some psychologists have claimed that there are three fundamental human emotions: fear, joy, and anger.  [[Neil Smelser]], [[John Lofland (sociologist)|John Lofland]],{{r|Lofland1985}} and others have proposed three corresponding forms of the crowd: the panic (an expression of fear), the craze (an expression of joy), and the hostile outburst (an expression of anger).  Each of the three emotions can characterize either a ''compact'' or a ''diffuse'' crowd, the result being a scheme of six types of crowds.  Lofland has offered the most explicit discussion of these types.

====The public====
Boom distinguishes the '''crowd''', which expresses a ''common emotion'', from a '''public''', which  discusses a ''single issue''.  Thus, a public is not equivalent to all of the members of a society.  Obviously, this is not the usual use of the word, "public."  To Park and Blumer, there are as many publics as there are issues.  A public comes into being when discussion of an issue begins, and ceases to be when it reaches a decision on it.

====The mass====
To the crowd and the public Blumer adds a third form of collective behavior, the '''mass.''' It differs from both the crowd and the public in that it is defined not by a form of interaction but by the efforts of those who use the mass media to address an audience.  The first mass medium was printing.

====The social movement====
{{Main|Social movement}}
We change intellectual gears when we confront Blumer's final form of collective behavior, the social movement. He identifies several types of these, among which are ''active'' social movements such as the French Revolution and ''expressive'' ones such as Alcoholics Anonymous.  An active movement tries to change society; an expressive one tries to change its own members.

The social movement is the form of collective behavior which satisfies least well the first definition of it which was offered at the beginning of this article.  These episodes are less fluid than the other forms, and do not change as often as other forms do.  Furthermore, as can be seen in the history of the labor movement and many religious sects, a social movement may begin as collective behavior but over time become firmly established as a social institution.

For this reason, social movements are often considered a separate field of sociology.  The books and articles about them are far more numerous than the sum of studies of all the other forms of collective behavior put together.  Social movements are considered in many Wikipedia articles, and an article on the field of social movements as a whole would be much longer than this essay.

The study of collective behavior spun its wheels for many years, but began to make progress with the appearance of Turner and Killian's "Collective Behavior"{{r|TurnerKillian1957}} and Smelser's ''Theory of Collective Behavior''.{{r|Smelser1962}} Both books pushed the topic of collective behavior back into the consciousness of American sociologists and both theories contributed immensely to our understanding of collective behavior.{{r|Locher2002|Miller2000}} Social disturbances in the U. S. and elsewhere in the late '60s and early '70s inspired another surge of interest in crowds and social movements.  These studies presented a number of challenges to the armchair sociology of earlier students of collective behavior.