Idania Vega Colón December 1rst, 2009

Crowds

How do you define crowds?

Crowds are a huge mass of people who different situations.

What is collective behavior?

When the mass of people take the same actions to the people surrounded. The people repeat the action established by other people. Is unpredictable and operates outside the social norms.

What is institutional behavior?

Institutional behaviors are established permanently. This occurs in a well-organized, rather predictable way. Institutional behavior is frequent and regular. The predictable patterns are controlled by social norms and are essential for social order. We could not survive whit out them.

Which are some traits the crowds share?

All crowds share a few traits. Exist five crowd characteristics.

The individuals in the crowds do not share clear expectation about how to behave and about what will happen.

They also tend to feel that something must be done right away to solve a common problem.

A feelings, attitudes, or ideas spread very quickly among crowd members. Also tend to go along with the actions of others without thinking too much about them. People in a crowd tend to say and do things they would not normally say and do.

Which are four types of crowds? Describe each one. Give example.

Herbert Blumer has identified four types of crowds:

Casual – is the most loosely organized. It emerges spontaneously. o Example

The street salesman incident Conventional – occurs in a planned manner.

o Example The football crowd may be acting spontaneously when they do the

“wave”. Acting – is involved in activity in which the members are concentrating on one particular

goal.o Example

Rioters and revolutionary crowds. Expressive – its members throw themselves into an activity, expressing their emotions.

o Example

Idania Vega Colón December 1rst, 2009

People at a rock concert.

Which is the Turner and Killian theory? Explain it. Give an example.

This is the emergent-norm theory. This theory explains why crowds seem to act together. This theory says that members of a crowd develop a new norm or rule to guide their behavior in a particular situation.

Which is Lebon’s Contagions theory? What does theory tells us?

Gustave Le Bon believed that the large number of people in a crowd allows our primitive, “animal” side to come out. His theory was that we normally hide this primitive side behind the “mask” of civilized behavior. When we are in a crowd, the large numbers give us a different kind of mask.

I tell in the first theory. Humans act depend the situation in which they are.