Understanding Collective Behavior: From Football Games to Riots

Collective behavior is social behavior that is relatively unorganized, spontaneous, and unpredictable. It contrasts with institutional behavior, which occurs in a well-organized, rather predictable way. Examples of collective behavior include football games, crowds around street salesmen, riots, and rock concerts. Crowds are groups of people temporarily doing something while physically close to one another, who may not share clear expectations about how to behave and about what will happen. Nearly all crowds share a few traits, such as feeling that something must be done right away to solve a common problem and going along with the actions of others without thinking too much about them. Sociologist Herbert Blumer has identified four types of crowds: casual, conventional, acting, and expressive. The emergent-norm theory explains why crowds seem to act together, as members of a crowd develop a new norm or rule to guide their behavior in a particular situation. French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon believed that the large number of people in a crowd allows our primitive, 'animal' side to come out, and we are then very easily affected by the emotion and action of others in the crowd.