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The expression collective behavior was first used by Franklin Henry Giddings[1] and employed later by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess,[2] Herbert Blumer,[3] Ralph H. Turner and Lewis Killian,[4] and Neil Smelser[5] to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure (laws, conventions, and institutions), but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way.
Collective behavior is always driven by group dynamics, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances.
[8] Turner and Killian were the first sociologists to back their theoretical propositions with visual evidence in the form of photographs and motion pictures of collective behavior in action.
Here are some instances of collective behavior: the Los Angeles riot of 1992, the hula-hoop fad of 1958, the stock market crashes of 1929, and the "phantom gasser" episodes in Virginia in 1933–34 and Mattoon, IL in 1944.
Although some consider McPhail's work[9] overly simplistic,[8] his important contribution is to have gone beyond the speculations of others to carry out pioneering empirical studies of crowds.
An array of such crazes and other historical oddities is narrated in Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
[12] At the University of Chicago, Robert Park and Herbert Blumer agreed with the speculations of LeBon and other that crowds are indeed emotional.
A number of authors modify the common-sense notion of the crowd to include episodes during which the participants are not assembled in one place but are dispersed over a large area.
Turner and Killian refer to such episodes as diffuse crowds, examples being Billy Graham's revivals, panics about sexual perils, witch hunts and Red scares.
We change intellectual gears when we confront Blumer's final form of collective behavior, the social movement.