Editing Collective behavior (section)

====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.