Suchergebnisse

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a "crisis discipline" just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

Data from the risky shift literature are brought to bear on collective behavior. The author suggests that the extreme behavior common in collective behavior is parallel to the shift to risk in small groups decision making, and that both phenomena can be conceptualized as group‐induced shifts to an extreme.

Emergent norm theory is clarified and expanded through analysis of the processes and circumstances by which the normative element emerges and persists in general and in collective behavior and collective action. An interdependency in risk principle is suggested, coupled with triggering conditions to evoke a specifically moral sense. The paper concludes with brief discussions of the sources of normative content and social structural conditions that are conducive to normative emergence.

"International safeguards" refer to a set of international agreements establishing control over the production, use, and final disposition of fissionable materials. Before the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into effect, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards had been applied to 75 reactors and ten other nuclear facilities under 51 different agreements. The design of the first regime was largely a function of political, strategic, and economic rather than technical considerations. After 1971, safeguards were made an integral part of the NPT, and became obligatory with respect to all peaceful nuclear activities in signatory states. Negotiations on the NPT safeguards regime focused on efforts to minimize the major asymmetrical costs that this implied, and particularly to meet the objections of major nonnuclear weapons states. The focus of controversy centered less on resistance to incursions on sovereignty than on demands for equity in incursion. In these negotiations, technological factors facilitated the construction of a politically acceptable regime.

Objective. This article offers a test of the normative explanation of collective behavior by examining the fire at the Station nightclub in Rhode Island that killed 100 and injured nearly 200 persons.Methods. Information on all persons at the club comes from content analysis of documents from the Rhode Island Police Department, the Rhode Island Office of the Attorney General, and The Providence Journal. We use negative binomial regression to test hypotheses about the effects of group‐level predictors of the counts of dead and injured in 179 groups at the nightclub.Results. Results indicate that group‐level factors such as distance of group members at the start of the fire, the number of intimate relations among them, the extent to which they had visited the nightclub prior to the incident, and the average length of the evacuation route they used predict counts of injured and dead. The research also looks at what behavioral differences exist between survivors and victims, ascertains the existence of role extension among employees of the nightclub, and provides support for the affirmation that dangerous contexts negate the protective influence of intimate relations in groups.Conclusion. We argue for the abandonment of current emphasis on irrationality and herd‐like imitative behavior in studies of evacuation from structural fires in buildings and for the inclusion of group‐level processes in social psychological explanations of these incidents.

AbstractThis study evaluates the collective behavior (CB) approach that dominated studies of social movements from the 1920s to the 1970s. Its roots lie in five scholarly traditions: Durkheim (collective consciousness), Mill (a sum of individual cost‐benefit calculations), Weber (charisma and bureaucracy), Simmel (interaction of individuals), and European mass psychology.CB studies began in Chicago University in the 1920s by Robert E. Park. His pupil Herbert Blumer made the basic classifications in the field. In the interactionist school, Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian stressed the emerging norms that modify CB, and Kurt and Gladys Engel Lang focused on collective processes. In the structure‐functionalistic school, Talcott Parsons stressed the impact of cultural trends in movement emergence, and Neil Smelser developed a value‐added theory of how social movements form.CB tradition was attacked in the 1960s when its theories did not fit into the student movement and there was a paradigm shift to resource mobilization and Marxist approaches. However, with the rise of constructivism, the ideas of CB have been reinvented in new social movement studies.