Science: Collective Behavior

When a crowd of passengers on a burning ship jumps overboard, when schoolboys go calmly through a fire drill, when four clubmen stage a drinking spree, when a mob of strikers overturns police cars, social psychologists call it collective behavior. Its special attribute is that the behavior of one individual affects, and is affected by, the behavior of others. It is almost impossible for human beings to come within shouting distance of one another without manifesting collective behavior.

German metaphysicians of the 18th and early 19th Centuries traced collective behavior to a group mind, a mystical collective ethos. This concept fell in with the German nationalist politics of that time (as it also does with contemporary Naziism) and it survives today in the writings of such eccentrics as Duke University’s William McDougall. Most social psychologists have rejected the ethos as a scientifically useless personification, like the patriotic personification of “Uncle Sam” or a child’s idea of Jack Frost and the Bogeyman. So far did the reaction swing against the group mind concept that some skeptics began to deny the existence of collective behavior, to declare that it was simply the sum of individual behavior. Dr. Richard Tracy La Piere, associate professor of sociology at Stanford University, believes that both these views are wrong, that social interaction patterns should be taken as real, but as distinct from individual patterns. Out last week was his Collective Behavior,* a volume in which he has tried to assemble available data as “a tentative frame of reference for further study.”

In the early stages of a science, the classification of its subject matter is a necessary job. Dr. La Piere divides collective behavior into several categories: institutional, conventional, regimental and formal (marriages, funerals, military organization and conduct, etc.); congenial (recreation); audience behavior; exchange (economic) and politic (political); nomothetic (behavior in regard to law); and such “escape” types of group behavior as panic, revelous, fanatical and rebellious.† By “revelous” behavior. Dr. La Piere means all kinds of revelry which serve to discharge tensions accumulated in day-to-day living—harvest festivals of peasants, New Year’s celebrations in cities, orgiastic dances of primitives, American Legion conventions. Having set up his categories of collective behavior, Dr. La Piere analyzes them in terms of their origins, functions, participants and ideologies—”ideology” being the reason for their behavior given by the participants. He also notes the points at which the ideologies do not correspond to the facts—as when a campaigning politician says he is running for office solely to serve the people.

Author of a novel called Son of Han, Sociopsychologist La Piere writes with more color and smoothness than most of his colleagues, draws much of his material from newspapers and magazines. Hence, he scrutinizes a number of phenomena which are rarely mentioned in scientific books—Fred Astaire and Jessie Matthews, the chain-letter craze, the Big Apple, Fashion Stylist Adrian of Hollywood, Variety. He turns a coldly skeptical and sardonic eye on the standard apologies for capitalism, also on the ideologies of democracy (“the safest votes, as every practical politician knows, are those which have been ‘bought’ “). But neither does he show any enthusiasm for leftist or rightist panaceas. “Although the fascists would be the first to deny it,” cracks Dr. La Piere, “the anticapitalistic aspects of fascist ideology are closely related to Marxianism.”

*McGraw-Hill ($4).

†For further scientific jargon, see page 26.