PSYCHOLOGY LITERATURE REVIEW

Psychology Literature Review

Psychology Literature Review

Introduction

The field of collective behavior is coterminous with the analysis of social dynamics. Before the emergence of the specialty, there was a concern with social change and societal transformation in the form of well-known and celebrated commentary about society and culture, such as Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War and Niccolo Machiavelli's advice to the prince. Abramson (1961:47-95) (see also Nye 1975; Rule 1988:91-118) provides a succinct account of origins, which by convention, are traced to Gustave LeBon, for he above all other Europeans writing at the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth captured the imagination of the public with his book titled The Crowd , which is both a compilations of the ideas of writers who opposed the ideals of the French Revolution and democracy—most prominently those of Edmund Burke, Hippolyte Taine, Scipio Sighele, Pasquale Rossi, and Gabriel Tarde—and an effective vehicle for conceptions of how people acted together that had and continue to have influence, as shown in Sigmund Freud's social psychology and in some of Robert E. Park's views of collective behavior.

The American Context

Collective behavior as an area of sociological specialization starts in the United States with the pioneering efforts of Robert E. Park (Turner 1967), who in 1899 traveled to Germany, where he studied at the Universities of Berlin, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. His doctoral dissertation (Park [1904] 1972) is titled Crowd and Public—it reflects many of the ideas in vogue at the time in Europe. Particularly noteworthy is his use of G. Tarde's concept of the public to identify a collective behavior form quite different from the crowd, in which deliberative and rational discussion and assessment of alternative viewpoints and interests were seen as the foundation of collective behavior and decision making. Later on, in his classic statement appearing as a chapter in his textbook coauthored with Ernest Burgess titled Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Park and Burgess 1921), Park laid out the contours of the field of specialization. Here we see the enduring characteristics of his scholarship. Reflecting the ideas in vogue at the time, Park to varying extents borrows from LeBon's view of the crowd as irrational and dominated by psychological regression. But this is never the dominant form of collective behavior in his writings, which advanced the field considerably by identifying a multiplicity of forms and by arranging these forms in a continuum of institutionalization, from elementary forms of collective behavior, to mass behaviors and social movements, to the emergence of institution. It is a natural sequence approach to social change. Institutions fail to satisfy human needs, and people who are affected by their failures become dissatisfied. Thus, there is first a stage of individual unrest, which is the foundation of social unrest, which then provides the grievance base for the possible occurrence of collective behavior, which in turn is the possible basis for the institutions that exist in the society, both as providing reasons to change them and ...