What was one of the earliest theories of collective behavior?

Among the analytic theories that seek to eschew evaluation, the most popular ones stress individual motivation in accounting for collective behaviour. Frustration and lack of firm social anchorage are the two most widely used explanations for individual participation in collective behaviour of all kinds. In the psychiatric tradition, frustration heightens suggestibility, generates fantasy, brings about regressions and fixations, and intensifies drives toward wish fulfillment so that normal inhibitions are overcome. Since most forms of collective behaviour promote thoughts that are otherwise difficult to account for and that breech behavioral inhibitions, this is often a fruitful source of explanation.

In the sociological tradition of Émile Durkheim, absence of firm integration into social groups leaves the individual open to deviant ideas and susceptible to the vital sense of solidarity that comes from participation in spontaneous groupings. Drawing upon both the psychiatric and the sociological traditions, Erich Fromm attributed the appeal of mass movements and crowds to the gratifying escape they offer from the sense of personal isolation and powerlessness that people experience in the vast bureaucracies of modern life. Extending Karl Marx’s theory of modern man’s alienation from his work, many contemporary students attribute faddism, crowds, movements of the spirit, and interest-group and revolutionary movements to a wide-ranging alienation from family, community, and country, as well as from work.

According to the approach suggested by the U.S. political scientist Hadley Cantril, participation in vital collectivities supplies a sense of meaning through group affirmation and action and raises the member’s estimate of his social status, both of which are important needs often frustrated in modern society. Eric Hoffer, a U.S. philosopher, attributed a leading role in collective behaviour to “true believers,” who overcome their own personal doubts and conflicts by the creation of intolerant and unanimous groups about them.

Sociologists and social psychologists, without denying the place of individual motivation in any complete explanation for collective behaviour, have more often stressed a distinctive quality or intensity of social interaction. The U.S. sociologist Ernest Burgess, along with Park, associates collective behaviour with “circular reaction,” a type of interaction in which each person reacts by repeating the action or mirroring the sentiment of another person, thereby intensifying the action or sentiment in the originator. Blumer adds a subtlety to this theory by sharply distinguishing circular reaction from “interpretative interaction,” in which the individual first interprets another’s action and then makes a response usually different from the stimulus action. Another stream of thought has stressed difference of intensity rather than kind of interaction. Following the lead of the French social scientist Gabriel Tarde and the French psychologist Alfred Binet, many investigators have looked for clues that normal imitative tendencies and suggestibility may be intensified in collective behaviour. An important approach is based on the U.S. psychologist Floyd H. Allport’s criticism of Le Bon and William McDougall, a British-born U.S. psychologist, for their concept of “group mind,” and for their apparent assumption that collective behaviour makes people do things to which they are not predisposed. Allport insisted instead that collective behaviour involves merely a group of people doing what they previously wanted to do but for which they lacked the occasion and the support of like-minded associates.

These interaction theories have been labeled contagion and convergence theories, respectively—the former stressing the contagious spread of mood and behaviour; the latter stressing the convergence of a large number of people with similar predispositions. Both have sought to explain why a group of people feel and act (1) unanimously, (2) intensely, and (3) differently from the manner in which they customarily act. Other interaction theorists have challenged the assumption of unanimity, proposing that in most kinds of collective behaviour a single mood and course of action is established with such force and intolerance that the many who privately dissent are silenced, creating an illusion of unanimity. Rather than contagion, it is an emergent norm or rule that governs external appearances and, to a lesser extent, internal convictions in collective behaviour.

Freud, too, stressed a distinctive pattern of interaction in collective behaviour. The key to these groupings is the desire to possess a beloved leader. Because the leader is unattainable, and because his attentions must be shared among many followers, a relation of identification is expressed in the demand for uniformity that the followers insistently impose on each other, according to the example of the leader.

A final set of theories stresses characteristics of social organization that generate collective behaviour. Collective behaviour is commonly seen by sociologists as a normal accompaniment and medium for social change, relatively absent in periods of social stability. With the more or less continuous shifts of values in any society, emerging values are first given group expression in collective behaviour; efforts to revitalize declining values also bring forth collective behaviour. Again, the constant readjustments in the power of different population segments are implemented and resisted through collective behaviour. Because it is a means of communication, and because it is always characterized by novel or intensified control over individuals, collective behaviour also arises to bypass blockages in communication and to install an emergent order when formal or informal regulation of behaviour is inadequate.

The most comprehensive theory specifying necessary conditions for the development of most major forms of collective behaviour was advanced by Smelser. He noted six conditions that must be present: (1) the social structure must be peculiarly conducive to the collective behaviour in question; (2) a group of people must experience strain; (3) a distinctive type of belief must be present to interpret the situation; (4) there must be a precipitating event; (5) the group of people must be mobilized for action on the basis of the belief; and (6) there must be an appropriate interaction between the mobilized group and agencies of social control. The detail for each condition varies with the type of collective behaviour.