Herd behavior  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Herd behavior describes how individuals in a group can act together without planned direction. The term pertains to the behavior of animals in herds, flocks and schools, and to human conduct during activities such as stock market bubbles and crashes, street demonstrations, riots and general strikes, sporting events, religious gatherings, episodes of mob violence and everyday decision-making, judgment and opinion-forming.

Herd behavior in human societies

The philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were among the first to criticize what they referred to as "the crowd" (Kierkegaard) and "herd morality" and the "herd instinct" (Nietzsche) in human society. Modern psychological and economic research has identified herd behavior in humans to explain the phenomena of large numbers of people acting in the same way at the same time. The British surgeon Wilfred Trotter popularized the "herd behavior" phrase in his book, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1914). In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen explained economic behavior in terms of social influences such as "emulation," where some members of a group mimic other members of higher status. In "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903), early sociologist George Simmel referred to the "impulse to sociability in man", and sought to describe "the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are made into a 'society' ". Other social scientists explored behaviors related to herding, such as Freud (crowd psychology), Carl Jung (collective unconscious), and Gustave Le Bon (the popular mind). Swarm theory observed in non-human societies is a related concept and is being explored as it occurs in human society.

See also

• Anxiety
• Bandwagon effect
• Collective behavior
• Collective consciousness
• Collective effervescence
• Collective intelligence
• Crowd psychology
• Conformity
• Fear
• Flocking (behavior)
• Group behavior
• Groupthink
• Herd
• Herd mentality
• Hive mind
• Informational cascade
• Mass hysteria
• Mean world syndrome
• Meme
• Mob rule
• Moral panic
• Propaganda
• Self-organization
• Sheeple
• Social proof
• Socionomics
• Spontaneous order
• Swarm intelligence
• Symmetry Breaking in Herding Behavior
• Team player
• The 2009 Birmingham, Millennium Point stampede
• The Hillsborough disaster
• Riot
• Stampede