Collective Behaviour:

The kinds of activities engaged in by sizable but loosely organized groups of people is called
collective behaviour. Episodes of collective behaviour tend to be quite unplanned, which may
be resulted from an experience shared by the members of the group that generates a sense of
common interest and identity. The familiarity of the group’s structure is the main source of the
frequent impulsiveness of collective behaviour.

Definition of Collective Behaviour:

The U.S. sociologist Robert E. Park, who invented the term collective behaviour, defined it as
“the behavior of individuals under the influence of an inclination that is common and collective,
an impulse, in other words, that is the result of social interaction.” He highlighted that
participant in crowds, trends, or other forms of collective behaviour share an attitude or behave
alike, not because of an established rule or the force of authority, and not because as
individuals they have the same attitudes, but because of a unique group process.

Characteristics of Collective Behaviour:

Sociologists use this term to refer to that social behaviour which exhibits the following
characteristics:
1. Spontaneous and episodic:
Collective behaviour is spontaneous and takes place occasionally rather than regularly and
routinely.

2. Unstable:
It tends to be short-lived as long as the center of attraction exists. It has no stable goals, values
and expectations like institutionalized behaviour.

3. Unstructured:
It has not set rules or procedures to follow like a regular and routine behaviour. Generally, it is
loosely structured.

4. Unpredictable:
The direction and outcome of such behaviour cannot be foretold.
5. Irrational:
Usually such behaviour is guided by unreasoning, beliefs, hopes, fears and hatreds. In such
situations, decisions are not generally made on the basis of logical or rational discussion.

6. Emotional:
Sometimes such behaviour is emotional and based on considerable personal interaction.

7. Non-traditional:
It is non-traditional in the sense that it is not clearly defined according to any culturally
established norms and values. In such situations, conventional guidelines and formal authority
fail to afford any direction for social action.

Forms of Collective Behaviour:

1. Responses to disaster:
A disaster-stricken community affords a typical situation for collective behaviour. The lives of
persons are disrupted accidentally by a tornado, flood, or earthquake, and coping with the
resulting devastation and disorder is beyond the capability of typical institutions. Of perhaps
greatest importance, the assumption of a reasonably stable and predictable reality is
undermined.
2. Collective obsessions:
The various kinds of collective obsession—fads, hysterias, and the like—have three main
features in common.
(1) The most visible sign is a remarkable increase in the rate and intensity with which people
engage in a specific kind of behaviour or assert a belief. There was an “epidemic” of flying-
saucer sightings; children in every residential neighborhood in the United States played on
skateboards; there was a sudden rush to buy Florida land.
(2) The behaviour—or the abandon with which it is spoiled—is ridiculous, irrational, or evil in
the eyes of persons who are not themselves caught up in the obsession. In the case of
entertaining fads, such as skateboarding, non-faddists are amazed at the tendency to drop all
other activities in order to focus on the fad; the hundreds of incidents in which swastikas were
smeared on synagogues during a few weeks in 1959 and 1960 in the United States, West
Germany, and other countries shocked the feelings of a world that remembered the Nazi
persecution of the Jews.
(3) After it has reached a peak, the behaviour drops off suddenly and is followed by a counter
obsession. To engage in the fad behaviour after the fad is over is to be subjected to ridicule;
after the speculative land boom declines, there is a mad rush to sell property at whatever price
it will bring.

Crowd Behaviour:
Definition:
The actions or conduct of a group of people who gather together temporarily while their
attention is focused on the same object or event. Such behavior may differ depending on the
nature of the crowd. For example, an audience tends to be relatively passive (smiling, laughing,
applauding), whereas a street or milling crowd normally moves without apparent aim and a
mob may act violently.

Characteristics of Crowd Behaviour:

Seven essential characteristics of crowd behaviour are as follows:
1. Anonymity:
Crowds are unknown, both because they are large and are provisional. Usually, the members of
a crowd act in a manner as if they do not know each other. The anonymity of the collective
gives each person in a crowd a feeling of invincible power which allows him/her to yield to
instinct.
2. Suggestibility:
The participants in a crowd become extremely suggestible as if they had been fascinated.
People become highly responsive to the suggestions of others, particularly the leader of the
crowd and thus their behaviour often becomes unpredictable. The movement of individuals to
go along with the crowd heightens leaps and bounds.
3. Contagion:
A contagion sweeps through the crowd like a virus that happens from one person to another.
Turner (1978) defines this aspect of crowd behaviour as ‘interactional amplification’. As people
work together, the reaction of the participants in the crowd increases in intensity towards the
common event or situation. If some people in the crowd start throwing stones at police, or
somebody else, their behaviour is likely to motivate others to do the same thing.
4. Emotionality:
Crowd behaviour is emotional and mostly impulsive. The members in a crowd become highly
sensitive. Anonymity, suggestibility and contagion tend to arouse emotions. In crowd situation
inhibitions are forgotten, and people become ‘charged’ to act. The members of the crowd do
not know what they are doing. There can be no prediction what it is likely to do at any moment.
5. Loosely structured:
Though crowd is an incompetent group, it does not totally lack in building. Individuals come
together not intentionally but it happens that there is some object of attention which attracts
each individual. This focus of attention later on helps in the development of some kind of
structure.
6. Unpredictable:
It is very hard to predict the behaviour of people, especially in acting crowd. A crowd in action
can be a frightening thing. In such crowds, the behaviour of members approaches most closely
to the packs and herds of the lower animals. Crowd member’s act uncritically upon submissions
as such their behaviour becomes utterly unpredictable.
7. Impersonality:
The sense of individuality is almost removed in the crowd. Persons do not behave as individual
members. The individual losses his/her personal limitations and sense of personal
responsibility. To condense the idea of crowd, it may be written that a crowd is temporary
grouping.

Types and forms of Crowd Behaviour:

1. Casual Crowd:
A casual crowd is a collection of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time.
It has no common identity or long-term purpose. This grouping of people waiting to cross the
street is an example of a casual crowd.

2. Conventional Crowd:
A conventional crowd is a collection of people who gather for a particular purpose. They might
be attending a movie, a play, a concert, or a lecture. Goode (1992) again thinks that
conventional crowds do not really act out collective behavior; as their name advocates, their
behavior is very conventional and thus relatively structured.
3. Expressive Crowd:
An expressive crowd is a collection of people who gather mainly to be excited and to express
one or more emotions. Examples include a religious revival, a political rally for a contender, and
events like Mardi Gras. Goode (1992, p. 23) points out that the main purpose of expressive
crowds is belonging to the crowd itself. Crowd activity for its members is an end in itself, not
just a means. In conventional crowds, the audience wants to watch the movie or hear the
lecture; being part of the audience is secondary or unrelated. In expressive crowds, the
audience also wants to be a member of the crowd, and participate in crowd behavior—to
scream, shout, cheer, clap, and stomp their feet.
4. Acting Crowd:
As its name implies, an acting crowd goes one important step away from an expressive crowd
by behaving in violent or other destructive behavior such as looting. A mob—an intensely
emotional crowd that commits or is ready to commit violent behavior—is a primary example of
an acting crowd. Many films and novels about the Wild West in U.S. history depict mobs
lynching cattle and horse rustlers without giving them the benefit of a trial. Beginning after the
Reconstruction period following the Civil War, lynch mobs in the South and elsewhere hanged
or otherwise murdered several thousand people, most of them African Americans, in what
would now be regarded as hate crimes.
5. Protest Crowd:
As recognized by Clark McPhail and Ronald T. Wohlstein (1983), a fifth type of crowd is the
protest crowd. As its name again implies, a protest crowd is a collection of people who gather
to protest a political, social, cultural, or economic issue. The gatherings of people who
participate in a sit-in, demonstration, march, or rally are all examples of protest crowds.

Audience:
Audience is defined as an individual's or a group of persons' reception and perception of a
culture product and products of communicative actions. Audience refers to a group of
individuals attending to a common media. Audience receive communication from the same
source but are not active participants and do not communicate with each other. Audience
Segmentation can drive speedier product development, and the decisions are made safer.
Audience and audience studies are used to draw attention to the methods used by media
corporations to develop audiences of readers, listeners and viewers with the objective of selling
access to this audience to advertisers. Audience studies is about culture effects. Audience
theory developed within academic literary theory and cultural studies

Mob:
By definition, mob is a disorderly, emotionally indicted crowd whose members engage in, or are
ready to engage in, violence against a specific target—a person, a category of people, or
physical property. Whereas the term crowd Opens in new window is often seen as impartial,
the term mob often has negative connotations. The word mob comes from the Latin term
mobile vulgus, which means “excitable crowd” (Drury 2002).
The hallmark of the mob is its emotion (Lofland, 1981). Early accounts of mobs argued that
individuals in mobs were so overwhelmed by their emotions that they could no longer control
their actions. Unless the situation is scattered, the mob becomes volatile, unpredictable, and
capable of violent action.

Riots:
A riot is a relatively spontaneous eruption of violence by a large group of people. The term riot
sounds very negative, and some scholars have used terms like urban revolt or urban uprising to
refer to the riots that many U.S. cities endured during the 1960s. However, most collective
behavior scholars continue to use the term riot without necessarily implying anything bad or
good about this form of collective behavior, and we use riot here in that same spirit.
Terminology nonetheless, riots have been part of American history since the colonial period,
when colonists often rioted regarding “taxation without representation” and other issues
(Rubenstein, 1970). Between 75 and 100 such riots are estimated to have occurred between
1641 and 1759. Once war broke out with England, several dozen more riots occurred as part of
the colonists’ use of violence in the American Revolution. Riots continued after the new nation
began, as farmers facing debts often rioted against state militia. The famous Shays’s Rebellion,
discussed in many U.S. history books, began with a riot of hundreds of people in Springfield,
Massachusetts.

Public and Public Opinion:

The name "public" originates with the Latin publicus (also poplicus), from populus, to the
English word 'populace', and in general denotes some mass population ("the people") in
association with some matter of common interest. So in political science and history, a public is
a population of individuals in association with civic affairs, or affairs of office or state. In social
psychology, marketing, and public relations, a public has a more situational definition.
Public opinion is an accumulate of the individual views, attitudes, and beliefs about a particular
topic, expressed by a significant proportion of a community. Some scholars treat the aggregate
as a synthesis of the views of all or a certain segment of society; others regard it as a collection
of many differing or contradictory views. Writing in 1918, the American sociologist Charles
Horton Cooley emphasized public opinion as a process of interaction and mutual influence
rather than a state of broad agreement. The American political scientist V.O. Key defined public
opinion in 1961 as “opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to
heed.” Successive advances in statistical and demographic analysis led by the 1990s to an
understanding of public opinion as the collective view of a defined population, such as a
particular demographic or ethnic group.
The influence of public opinion is not restricted to politics and elections. It is a powerful force in
many other circles, such as culture, fashion, literature and the arts, consumer spending, and
marketing and public relations.
propaganda, dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumors, half-truths, or lies—to
influence public opinion.

Propaganda:
Propaganda is the more or less methodical effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs,
attitudes, or actions by means of symbols (words, gestures, banners, monuments, music,
clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth). Slowness and
a relatively heavy emphasis on handling distinguish propaganda from casual conversation or the
free and easy discussion of ideas. Propagandists have a specified goal or set of goals. To achieve
these, they deliberately select facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and present them in
ways they think will have the most influence. To maximize effect, they may omit or distort
pertinent facts or simply lie, and they may try to divert the attention of the reactors (the people
they are trying to sway) from everything but their own propaganda.

Techniques of Propaganda:
Though propaganda techniques can be utilised by bad actors on the world stage, these same
concepts can be utilized by individuals in their interactive relationships. Regardless of how
propaganda is employed, these common techniques are used to manipulate others to act or
respond in the way that the propagandist desires.
1. Bandwagon:
The desire to fit in with peers has long been recognized as a powerful force in society.
Propagandists can exploit this yearning by using the bandwagon technique to appeal to the
public. This common propaganda technique is used to convince the public to think, speak, or
act in a particular way simply because others are. The public is invited to “jump on the
bandwagon” and not be left behind or left out as the rest of society engages in what they
perceive to be correct behavior.
2. Snob Appeal:
In an attempt to appeal to the general public’s desire to belong to society’s high class,
propagandists can use snob appeal as a selling technique. This technique involves encouraging
the public to behave in ways that are agreeable to the propagandists and serve their purposes.
In order for this technique to be successful, propagandists have to first position themselves as
having a product, idea or opinion that is worthy of elite status. Many publicists in charge of
public relations for companies employ a similar technique as a way to sustain the perception
that the business creates and sells high-quality goods.
3. Vague Terms:
Propagandists sometimes achieve their goal of waving public opinion simply by using empty
words. When employing this technique, propagandists will deliberately use vague terms meant
to entice. Examination of the terms, however, can reveal that they offer no real definition or
commitment to meaning. The goal of this type of propaganda can be to offer generalities that
incite audiences to expend their energy on interpretation rather than critiquing.
4. Loaded Words:
Words have power when it comes to public relations, and it’s no surprise that many
propagandists use a technique involving loaded words to sway public opinion. When
attempting to convince the public to act, propagandists may use excessively positive words or
those with acceptable associations. If the goal is to hinder action, propagandists can select
words that are highly negative to communicate with the public such as those that inspire fear,
anger, or doubt. A simple and effective means of loaded words usage is the act of name-calling,
which many political groups have used to disparage opposition, quell dissent. and scapegoat
groups of people.
5. Transfer:
Propagandists may attempt to join two unrelated concepts or items in an effort to push what
they’re selling to the public. With the technique of transfer, propagandists conjure up either
positive or negative images, connect them to an unrelated concept or item, and try to move the
public to act. Commonly, propagandists can associate the glory or virtue of a historical event
with their product or the action that they want the public to take. Conversely, transfer can also
be employed as a means to encourage the public to not take an action, lest they suffer a
disagreeable fate.
6. Unreliable Testimonial:
Propaganda can pivot on the ability of an unrelated person to successfully sell an idea, opinion,
product, or action. In modern day advertising, companies may enlist celebrities to help sell their
products as part of their public relations efforts. Oftentimes, these celebrities don’t have any
personal experience with the products or background with the science applied to create them,
but their testimonial can increase sales simply because they provide a recognizable and
sometimes trustworthy face to the public. Viewers of this type of propaganda put their faith in
the endorsement rather than judging the product, idea, or company on its own merits.

Difference Between Public and Crowd:

1. A crowd is transient and impulsive whereas the public does not exhibit emotional intensity
and recklessness.
2. In the crowd there are expectancy, enthusiasm and anticipation; in the public there is an
absence of excitement and tension.
3. Public is a scattered group of people whereas the members of a crowd collect at one place—
a scene of incident or accident.
4. Public is a significant group whereas in a crowd no critical discussion is possible. In the public,
discussion is essential which is generally free and unimpassioned.
5. The members of a public have common interests but are not like-minded as in crowd. They
show differences of opinion over common issues.
6. In the crowd, the contact between its members is personal and face-to-face while in the
public the contact is through communication by means of press, TV, radio, etc. Public is not
necessarily a face-to-face group.
7. In the crowd, there is contagion through contact; in the public, there is contagion without
contact.
8. A public is a much bigger group than a crowd.
9. The crowd is more suggestible than the public.
10. The crowd is an ecstatic accumulation while the public is a rational group.
11. The crowd generates and expresses emotion and nulls to a dominating collective impulse;
the public deliberates in regard to issue on the basis of facts and evidence.
12. The crowd reaches unanimity through the development of rapport; the public arrives at a
consensus through the clash and modification of opinion.
13. Public has long life than crowds which dissolve through fatigue or discomfort of the
members. People disperse as soon as the objective is achieved.

References:
http://sociologyindex.com/audience_and_audience_studies.htm. (n.d.).

https://dictionary.apa.org/crowd-behavior. (n.d.).

https://gspm.online.gwu.edu/blog/public-relations-and-propaganda-techniques/. (n.d.).

https://ifioque.com/social-psychology/mob. (n.d.).

https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/soci101/chapter/21-1-types-of-collective-behavior/. (n.d.).

https://www.britannica.com/science/collective-behaviour. (n.d.).

https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/collective-behavior/7-essential-characteristics-of-crowd-
behaviour/31284. (n.d.).

https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/collective-behavior/collective-behaviour-meaning-and-
characteristics-of-collective-behaviour/31287. (n.d.).