From Social Mood to Collective Events: Measuring the Path by Sociometers

Abstract

In the paper, I introduce the concept of social mood. It may be defined as the collective feeling/belief a social group or population has about its future on different time scales. On a given time scale, say, a year, the social mood is positive if the population feels that things will be "better" one year from now than they are today; if they believe that things will be worse, then the social mood is negative on that time scale. The social mood is an example of "internal ideology" of a social group that transforms beliefs and expectations of a set of individuals into different beliefs and expectations that cannot be deduced from individual feelings. Within the socionomics paradigm, there is a logical dependence: herd instinct → social mood (beliefs/feelings) → social behaviour and collective events. This flow is the central hypothesis of socionomics. Considering various examples of social moods and events (e.g., collapse of Enron Corporation in 2001; history of US presidential elections from the foundation of USA up to the present, building the world's tallest skyscrapers; Middle East military conflicts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; terrorist attacks and state leader's assassination), I demonstrate the central hypothesis in action. In the paper, I suggest using the national stock market indexes as the sociometer. To be more specific, stock market index behaviour does not follow positive or negative social events; it often anticipates them. Moreover, I show that the stock market index is an almost universal indicator of the social mood of population. It works not only for the American realities but everywhere in the world. I describe examples of Brazil, BRICS countries and Turkey to underlie this assumption. These examples provide ample evidence to support the notion that the mood of a population, i.e. its social mood biases the types of social events and behaviours that we can expect to see on all time scales. I argue that the social mood may beget a specific social behaviour and a set of social ...