Purposive Collective Action

Multitudes, crowds, and mobs have preoccupied preachers, politicians, and police for centuries because of their concerns with persuading, producing, or controlling the behavior of the people who compose such gatherings. Crowds have also been the concern of students of society and human behavior, more often to offer explanations for why people behave as they do in crowds than to describe what they do and understand how their behavior comes about. Until relatively recently, this was the fundamental mistake of all students of the crowd: their explanations were based upon few if any firsthand, on-site observations, let alone systematic descriptions, of the phenomena to be explained. Most psychologists and sociologists believed that the crowd transformed the psychological processes of its individual members. Individuals were thought to lose control of their cognitive powers of rationality, volition, and agency under the influence of “the crowd mind” and therefore to mindlessly comply with the suggestions directed at them by charismatic leaders. The result was thought to be mutually inclusive collective behavior. Other psychologists subsequently advanced the counterclaim that crowds never change individuals; instead, individuals are always driven to the crowd, where they behave as they do, because of their similar psychological predispositions. The sights and sounds of the behaviors of surrounding others, driven by similar predispositions, only facilitated participation in what then became mutually inclusive behavior.