Deck 17: Crowds and Collectives

Question 1

What kind of crowds are "black Friday" shoppers and given that classification,what kind of emotions and actions are they likely to display?

Answer 1

Answers will vary.

Question 2

Are riots caused by the loss of identity,or by the activation of a collective identity?

Answer 2

Answers will vary.

Question 3

Describe a time when you were part of a large crowd.Did the crowd form because of a shared focus,what did the crowd do,and what caused the crowd to disperse?

Answer 3

Answers will vary.

Question 4

How do audiences know when to start and stop clapping?

Question 5

Describe the interpersonal processes that occur when individuals form and maintain queues.

Question 6

What is the difference between a collective movement (such as a fad or trend)and a social movement?

Question 7

Use Zimbardo's (1969)theory of deindividuation to explain the results obtained in the study of Halloween trick-or-treaters (Diener et al. ,1976).

Question 8

Describe the methods used and results obtained by Milgram and his associates in their study of crowd formation on the streets of New York.

Question 9

Use the concept of relative deprivation to explain why people join social movements.

Question 10

List and briefly describe the defining features of collectives.

Question 11

Use McPhail's crowd observation system to describe the behavior of individuals during a sporting event.

Question 12

Do you consider a "gathering" (e.g. ,an audience in movie theater,a congregation in church)to be a social group or a crowd? Why?

Question 13

Use emergent norm theory to develop a set of recommendations for maintaining order in large crowds at sporting events,parades,and street festivals.

Question 14

Compare Le Bon's contagion theory to a convergence theory of crowds.

Question 15

Why do people spread rumors?

Question 16

You are called in to investigate complaints by the occupants of a building who believe that the structure is unhealthy.What will you do to study the possibility that their complaints are a mild form of mass hysteria or psychogenetic illness?

Question 17

What causes collectives to panic,and what steps can be taken to prevent overcrowding disasters?

Question 18

Summarize Zimbardo's (1969)theory of deindividuation.

Question 19

Compare and contrast the "crowd-as-mad" and "crowd-as-group" interpretations of crowd behavior.

Question 20

Explain an instance of crowd behavior that you have personally observed,such as the reaction of sports fans following a team victory.

Question 21

Convergence theory suggests that individuals who take part in collective movements share some basic similarity.

Question 22

Collectives come in many shapes and sizes,but they nonetheless have one defining feature: members are always together in the same physical location.

Question 23

A flash mob is a celebratory or aggressive mob that exists only very briefly.

Question 24

Psychogenic illnesses are illness that have no organic basis and are likely caused by psychological and interpersonal factors.

Question 25

Studies of people who pass rumors suggest they do so to frighten and/or manipulate other people.

Question 26

When researchers studied trick-or-treaters,they confirmed that the two key ingredients to negative,antisocial behavior were (a)membership in a group and (b)anonymity.

Question 27

Panics differ from riots emotionally: panics are usually anxious or fearful.

Question 28

The social movement in Egypt in the spring of 2011 was an example of a revolutionary social movement.

Question 29

A review of recent research investigating collective behavior suggests the Le Bon was correct when he argued people become slightly mad when they join in large crowds and mobs.

Question 30

Milgram,by having a group of confederates stare up at a point on a distant building,discovered people who passed by would also stare up at the same point on the distant building if there were five or more confederates in the stimulus group.

Question 31

Pedestrian bands occur when large groups of people must move through a space,such as a crosswalk,a hallway,or staircase,but in opposite directions.

Question 32

As anxiety decreases and certainty increases,individuals tend to circulate more rumors.

Question 33

A collective is a group of unrelated individuals who share some quality in common,such as hair color or age.

Question 34

Riots tend to be examples of intergroup behavior rather than just group behavior.

Question 35

Emergent norm theory suggests that the best way to keep crowds from engaging in negative behaviors to maintain clear norms that define what behaviors are expected of all members.

Question 36

All videos posted on YouTube that go viral have one thing in common: they are visually surprising.

Question 37

The Gergens' study of people in a dark room found that people tend to distance themselves as much as possible from others to avoid unwanted contact.

Question 38

In general,collectives differ from other groups in terms of size (they are larger),proximity of members (they are often dispersed),and duration (they often come into existence and disband quickly).

Question 39

Blumer argued that contagion is more likely when group members display circular reactions rather than interpretative reactions.

Question 40

Individuals who join social movements are more likely experiencing fraternal deprivation rather than egoistic deprivation.

Question 41

"The individual breaks away and wants to escape from it because the crowd,as a whole,is endangered.But because he is still stuck in it,he must attack it" (Canetti,1962,p.26).What is being described?

A)an acquisitive panic
B)a riot
C)a lynch mob
D)an escape panic
E)hooliganism

Question 42

Which of the following is the BEST example of a collective?

A)a jury
B)an expedition
C)a mob
D)a social network site on the Internet

Question 43

The hallmark of the mob is its

A)violence.
B)emotion.
C)disorganization.
D)size.
E)groupmind.

Question 44

Which of the following does NOT fit with the others?

A)mobbing
B)lynch mobs
C)hooliganism
D)riots
E)collective movements

Question 45

Which of the following does not fit with the others?

A)gatherings
B)audiences
C)queues
D)riots

Question 46

Which of the following does not fit with the others?

A)diffusions
B)trends
C)fads
D)social movements
E)riots

Question 47

Norms governing proper conduct are MOST apparent in

A)crowds.
B)mobs.
C)audiences.
D)street crowds.
E)panics.

Question 48

Pedestrian bands result from

A)careful monitoring of the movement of people walking through an area by authorities.
B)the use of signal lights at intersections that regulate the flow of pedestrians.
C)the tendency for pedestrians to fall in line as they move through a crossing.
D)someone spontaneously stepping in and organizing the group in small bands that move together in unison.

Question 49

Which sequence orders these collectives from most structured to least structured?

A)panics,queues,audiences,street crowds,mobs.
B)queues,audiences,street crowds,mobs,panics.
C)queues,street crowds,mobs,audiences,panics.
D)audiences,queues,panics,street crowds,mobs.

Question 50

Which of the following statements is true?

A)Crowd crystals are more likely to be present in queues than in crowds.
B)Crowds,unlike most other types of groups,are unique in that they have no structure.
C)A crowd of five people is unlikely to draw people to it;ten or more individuals are needed to trigger the crowd formation process.
D)Every crowd is so unique that they can be studied only using case study methods.
E)Members of crowds are united by their shared focus on attention.

Question 51

Two basic types of panics are

A)planned and spontaneous.
B)acquisitive and escape.
C)mobbing and crowding.
D)fads and crazes.
E)aggressive and submissive.

Question 52

College students dye their hair blue.A rumor spreads across the country that a fast food chain puts worms in the hamburgers.Members of fraternities loot a resort community.An audience applauds the play.These incidents are all examples of

A)crowds.
B)collective processes.
C)fads.
D)deindividuation.

Question 53

Which of the following statements is FALSE?

A)The word "queue" derives from the French word for a braid of hair.
B)Only straight lines that determine order of service can be considered queues.
C)Milgram found that individuals enforce the norms of a waiting line both verbally and nonverbally.
D)Queues are based on the norm "first come,first served" (or "first in,first out").
E)Queues are sustained both by social norms and self-interest.

Question 54

Collectives tend to

A)be small,with less than 20 members.
B)form slowly rather than rapidly.
C)exist outside of traditional groups and social structures.
D)adopt norms that restrict members' behaviors.
E)clearly define who is in the group and who is not.

Question 55

Which of the following statements is FALSE?

A)Unlike crowds,which tend to remain in place,mobs are mobile: they move.
B)The emotions displayed by celebratory mobs are positive rather than negative.
C)Flash mobs are short-lived but deliberately formed groups of people who gather together only briefly to perform some disbanding.
D)The key emotion in an aggressive mob is anger.
E)Riots are mobs in which members have become so hostile that they lose all self-control.

Question 56

Which of the following is NOT one of the categories of elementary crowd behavior identified by McPhail and his colleagues in their crowd-behavior coding system?

A)movement
B)vocalization
C)mayhem
D)gesticulation
E)manipulation

Question 57

McPhail's method for classifying the behavior of people in crowds into such categories as gesticulation and vocalization indicates that

A)crowds tend to engage in odd and unusual behaviors.
B)large groups of people in public places are best studied through survey methods.
C)Le Bon's contagion theory provides the best explanation for crowd formation.
D)most crowd behavior can be classified as task oriented or relationship oriented.
E)the behaviors performed by people in crowds can be classified into a small number of basic categories.

Question 58

What prevents the queue from breaking down into a disorderly crowd?

A)normative processes
B)individuals in the line who act as leaders
C)habits
D)self-control
E)mindlessness

Question 59

In Milgram's study of people who passed a group of confederates staring at a building,if we define "joining the crowd" as imitating the behavior of the confederates (by looking up at the building),then we can conclude

A)individuals only join crowds when they feel they are like the individuals in the crowd.
B)crowds form when two or more people gather in one place.
C)anonymity of a large group is critical to crowd formation.
D)the lure of a crowd reaches its peak once it contains 5 or more members.
E)individuals who are busy are unlikely to join a crowd.

Question 60

What percentage of passersby looked in the direction of the crowd (of five or more individuals)in Milgram's study of crowd formation on the sidewalk of New York?

A)fewer than 20%
B)20-40 %
C)about 50 %
D)over 70 %

Question 61

Zimbardo argues that deindividuation

A)occurs in solitary individuals as well as groups.
B)is a process involving input variables and output variables.
C)causes only positive,prosocial behaviors.
D)causes only negative,antisocial behaviors.

Question 62

Dangerous levels of overcrowding can be reduced by

A)making the entrances smaller than the exits.
B)insisting on the use of queues.
C)providing ways for people to escape from the situation if crowding becomes too great.
D)minimize cross-flows within the crowd.
E)taking all the precautions listed here.

Question 63

Members of ___ in many cases do not occupy the same physical location.

A)social movements
B)queues
C)crowds
D)panics
E)mobs

Question 64

Le Bon's crowd psychology assumed that crowd members

A)engaged in interpretative,rather than circular,reactions.
B)lost their social identities in the group.
C)felt compelled to follow the norm that emerged in their group.
D)were all like one another in some way.
E)fell prey to the "law of mental unity".

Question 65

Just after the earthquake people were (a)very anxious and (b)very uncertain about the true nature of the situation.According to Rosnow this situation is ripe for

A)mob formation.
B)the spread of rumors.
C)a collective movement.
D)crowding.

Question 66

___ movements aim to improve institutions whereas ___ movements aim to reverse or slow change.

A)Reformist;revolutionary
B)Revolutionary;reactionary
C)Communitarian;reactionary
D)Revolutionary;communitarian
E)Reformist;reactionary

Question 67

Mothers Against Drunk Drivers,Moonies,the pro-life organization,and the Black Panthers are all example of

A)crowds.
B)mobs.
C)audiences.
D)casual crowds.
E)social movements.

Question 68

Le Bon's theory,convergence theory,and emergent-norm theory are all theories of

A)social facilitation.
B)deindividuation.
C)crowd behavior.
D)group performance.
E)group entitativity.

Question 69

The Werther syndrome,choreomania,tulipmania,and biting mania are all examples of

A)rumors.
B)psychogenic illness.
C)rioting.
D)mass hysteria.
E)collective consciousness.

Question 70

What is the cause of death when people are caught in extremely high density situations,such as the crowds at the Who concert or the Love Parade?

A)Heart failure
B)Asphyxiation
C)Blood loss
D)Blunt trauma
E)Stress

Question 71

After reading about a riot at a hockey game,a person says "Well,what do you expect given the sorts of people who go to those things." This statement is most consistent with a(n)___ theory of collective behavior.

A)convergence
B)deindividuation
C)emergent norm
D)contagion

Question 72

The emotional and physical arousal of groups of individuals simply through the observation of arousal in others is known as

A)a fad.
B)contagion.
C)hyperfolia.
D)collectivism.
E)hypofolia.

Question 73

Which of the following does not fit with the others?

A)crowds
B)crazes
C)fads
D)fashions

Question 74

An emergent-norm approach to stopping sports violence recommends

A)shifting to more individualistic sports.
B)changing fans' expectations about the normalcy of violence.
C)changing the physical layout of stadiums.
D)adding more crowd-control officers.
E)isolating the team from the spectators.

Question 75

In 1979 eleven members of a group were killed outside a concert hall where the rock group the Who was going to perform.This group was a(n)

A)queue failure.
B)aggressive mob.
C)acquisitive panic.
D)audience.
E)riot.

Question 76

Which of the following statements is true?

A)People experiencing egoistic deprivation are more likely to join a social movement than those experiencing fraternal deprivation.
B)Individuals with previous experience in movements are less likely to join new ones (the "sadder but wiser effect").
C)The more people identify with a social movement the more likely they will be to take part in it.
D)People who take part in social movements tend to be extroverts ("joiners").

Question 77

I think that mob action is like a disease that overtakes healthy people,corrupts them,and causes them to act in ways they never would normally.I favor ___ theory of crowding.

A)convergence
B)emergent norm
C)Le Bon's contagion
D)social identity

Question 78

As ___ theory suggests,the social movement in Egypt succeeded,in part,because its leaders developed a coherent guiding message that they communicated skillfully to constituents.

A)resource mobilization
B)framing
C)contagion
D)framing
E)convergence

Question 79

The man explains his intoxication at a sporting event by saying,"Everyone always drinks at these events;it's just the normal thing to do." His reaction is most consistent with a(n)___ theory of collective behavior.

A)deindividuation
B)contagion
C)emergent norm
D)convergence
E)social identity

Question 80

The American Civil Rights movement that sought to change unfair,prejudicial laws was a ___ movement.

A)reformist
B)revolutionary
C)communitarian
D)reactionary
E)regressive