What collective behaviour is
Definition
Collective behaviour
The way people behave when they are part of a crowd or large group, which can be very different from how they would act alone.
- Collective behaviour: what people do when they act together as part of a large group.
- Behaviour changes in the group: being in a large group makes bolder, louder or more generous behaviour more likely.
- Crowd behaviour: collective behaviour in a crowd, meaning a large number of people gathered in one place at the same time.
- A Premier League ground, Notting Hill Carnival, a town centre on a Friday night and a march down Whitehall all count as crowds.
- A crowd needs numbers: a crowd is a large gathering, so four of you in a common room counts as a small group.
- Behaviour spreads outwards: a few people start something, the people nearest them copy it, and it travels through the crowd person by person.
- Collective behaviour can happen at a distance: a rush to fill up at every petrol station in the country after one news report is people acting together while nowhere near each other.
Key Idea
- Being one face among thousands loosens the restraints on what you will do, which is why a crowd can turn either violent or generous.
- A man who never sings at home will chant with 30,000 others, and the same numbers can make kicking in a shop window feel possible.
- The behaviour travels outwards from a few people to the people nearest them, so what a crowd ends up doing depends on what starts.
Features of collective behaviour
- Numbers: you need a large group rather than a handful of people.
- Acting together: they are doing the same thing at the same time, such as chanting, surging forward or handing something along a row.
- A shift from how they would act alone: the behaviour is bolder, louder or more generous than the same person on their own would manage.
- A man who never sings in the shower belting out a chant with 30,000 others shows all three at once.
Note
- A lot of people in one place is not enough on its own, because commuters waiting separately for the same train are not acting together.
- There is no fixed number at which a group becomes a crowd; what marks one out is a gathering large enough for people to stop feeling watched as individuals.
- Behaving differently in a crowd does not remove your responsibility for what you did, since people who loot in a crowd are still charged one by one.
Pro-social behaviour in crowds
Definition
Pro-social behaviour
Any action intended to help or benefit another person, such as comforting, sharing or coming to someone's aid.
- Pro-social behaviour: any action that helps or benefits other people.
- In a crowd it looks small and practical: hauling a stranger back onto their feet, passing bottles of water forward, flagging a steward down when someone faints.
- It can also run to whole neighbourhoods: after the riots of August 2011, residents turned up in numbers with brooms to sweep their own high streets.
- The crowd can be what makes helping easy: you join in partly because everyone around you is already doing it, and that still counts as pro-social behaviour.
Anti-social behaviour in crowds
Definition
Anti-social behaviour
Behaviour that causes harassment, alarm or distress to other people but often falls short of serious crime, such as vandalism, graffiti or persistent nuisance.
- Anti-social behaviour: action that harms, threatens or distresses other people, or that breaks the norms a society expects people to keep.
- What it looks like in a crowd: throwing objects, smashing shop fronts, looting, fighting and abusive chanting aimed at one group of people.
- The harm defines it: pushing past people and shouting abuse distresses others whether or not anyone is charged.
- Numbers make it bolder: with a hundred other people on the street, kicking in a shop window starts to feel possible.
Example
- On a packed terrace, thousands of fans singing as one lift a stranger who has gone down in the crush back onto his feet.
- That is pro-social collective behaviour, because the crowd acting together helped someone.
- Twenty minutes later, in the same stand, a group throws coins at the away keeper.
- That is anti-social collective behaviour, because the group acting together caused harm.
How crowd behaviour spreads
- Numbers amplify whatever has already started: the people nearest the first few copy what they are doing, so one row starting a chant can end with a whole stand singing it.
- The switch can take minutes: the same festival field can go from strangers sharing sun cream to a crush at the barrier in the time one set takes.
- Most crowds stay peaceful: anti-social crowd behaviour is one outcome out of many.
Common Mistake
- Anti-social behaviour and crime overlap without being the same thing, so vandalism and persistent nuisance count even where nobody is charged.
- Collective behaviour does not need a large group gathered in one place, because people can act together while far apart.
Turning this into marks
- When a pro-social and an anti-social example are both asked for, make them genuinely separate rather than one behaviour rephrased.
- Name the behaviour the group actually carried out, because the label pro-social or anti-social on its own does not secure the knowledge mark.
- Point at the size of the group and at the fact they acted together, because that is what makes the behaviour collective.
- The mark most often lost is describing one person acting alone in an answer about crowd behaviour.
Self review
- What is collective behaviour?
- How is crowd behaviour different from collective behaviour in general?
- Define pro-social behaviour and give one crowd example.
- Define anti-social behaviour and give one crowd example.
- Name the three things a scenario must show for the behaviour to count as collective.
