Collective Behavior
When you join a group, you do not lose your individuality, but you do tend to act differently. Collective behavior occurs when individuals converge, thus creating a group or crowd, and embark on some sort of action. While crowds gather for different purposes and may seem disorderly, collective behavior theories suggest that such occurrences are often organized and do maintain a certain among of order.
Collective behaviors are unusual or non-routine behaviors that large numbers of people participate in.
Whether the collective behavior involves a crowd gathered at a pep rally or an entire social movement, like the Civil Rights Movement, Sociology opens a world of understanding about why and how people behave collectively to accomplish their goals and to interact collectively together in large numbers.
There are a variety of types of collective behaviors. One is a mass. For example, the media (TV and internet) allow large numbers of people to watch and participate in events at the same time, even if they are not physically present at the actual event.
A mass is a large number of people oriented toward a set of shared symbols or social objects.
The NFL's Super Bowl draws an enormous mass of viewers in the U.S. and the world - over 130 million in the U.S. alone. The World Cup of Soccer (known as Futball outside the U.S.) tends to draw over 1 billion viewers. That's a tremendous number of people in a mass of fans and viewers worldwide! This enables people who would not otherwise be able to go the event to still feel like a participant.
Crowds are large numbers of people in the same space at the same time.
Crowds are not always groups who share a common identity, have roles, and meet together often. They are more often many people in the same place at the same time doing about the same thing (similar to aggregates).
Imagine that you go on vacation to a large city. You're staying in a nice hotel on the 16th floor. You look out of your window down to the street and you see a world-class marathon taking place with thousands of participants. As you imagine what this scene might look like, think about how Sociologists might try to get a metaphorically similar view by studying masses and crowds. This gives a uniquely powerful perspective when studying society.
