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This article presents additional thoughts about collective behavior with reference to two papers on the Kent State University incident which papers were written as applications of theory of collective behavior. The author developed this theory to establish general analytic relations among a set of variables that he had discovered to be important in the genesis of hundreds of episodes of collective behavior. One of the most original and strongest aspects of the theory was its emphasis on the behavior of agents of social control as determinants of the timing, content, direction, and outcomes of episodes of collective behavior. The author stressed social-structural aspects, but he underplayed the importance of psychological mechanisms in the dynamics of episodes of collective behavior. In this article, the author developed a few new thoughts about the psychological and organizational characteristics of collective behavior in reading the two papers. These thoughts are developed under three headings, strategies to fix blame and assign illegitimacy in episodes of conflict; the relations among different agents of social control as these influence the development of an episode; and shifts in the definition of the situation, and the implication of these shifts for the application of the value-added model.

The article presents authors personal thoughts on the pursuit of sociological problems. The author intends to retrace his steps along one path of his intellectual career--the path that links two books, titled, "Social Change in the Industrial Revolution," and "Theory of Collective Behavior," and a number of recent articles and papers on sociological theory and psychological theory. The main emphasis in the article was on the need for a determinate synthesis of the several classes of variables that are essential for the explanation of collective behavior such as cultural, social, psychological, ecological and other variables. In attempting to sort out the major influences on his choice of sociological problems, he resorts to a device that he find congenial and helpful: to arrange these influences in a series extending from very general, predisposing influences which have steered his intellectual interests to the very specific, immediate influences that have determined a particular strategy of analysis in working on a sociological problem.

The article illustrates that one cannot understand the actions of human beings as members of a society unless one assumes that there is a group of facts termed as societal facts which are as ultimate as are those facts which are psychological in character. To this it may be objected that any statement concerning the status of an individual is itself analyzable in terms of how specific individuals behave towards other individuals, and how these in turn behave towards them. Thus it might be claimed that while the explanation of an individual's behaviour often demands the introduction of concepts referring to societal status, such concepts are themselves reducible to further statements concerning actual or probable forms of behaviour. Thus, societal concepts might be held to be heuristic devices, summarizing repeated patterns of behaviour, but they would be nothing more: their real meaning would lie in a conjunction of statements concerning the behaviour of a number of individuals. However, it will be useful to comment on three objections which have frequently been raised against the view that societal facts are irreducible to psychological facts. The first of these objections may be termed the ontological objection. It consists in holding that societal facts cannot be said to have any status of their own since no such facts would exist if there were not individuals who thought and acted in specific ways. The second of the most usual objections to the thesis that societal facts cannot be reduced to psychological facts is an epistemological objection. This objection may take many forms, depending upon the theory of knowledge which is held by the objector. However, the common core of all such objections is the indubitable fact that societal concepts are not capable of being pointed to, in the sense in which we can point to material objects, or to the qualities or activities of these objects.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a report of research designed to explore the attitudes of licensed migrant camp farm operators in Ohio toward their Mexican-American migrant employees. Mexican-Americans are the primary source of migrant farm labor in Ohio. They are part of a stream of seasonal agricultural laborers who travel north from southern Texas to Ohio to assist with the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of fruits and vegetables. In this study, the authors selected variables that are largely sociological in nature. This is done not to deny the importance of social-psychological factors in contributing to ethnic attitudes, but the focus here is on the relationship between interactional variables and the majority group's perception of characteristics of the minority group. As a result of the authors' exploration, it was found that the lack of relationship between the background variables and attitudes toward the migrants can probably be explained through the relatively high degree of homogeneity among the farm employers on several variables. The religious variable does affect the attitude of the farmers creating a sense of minority or majority wherein minority farmers are sometimes more prejudiced than the majority toward their minorities.

Demands ushered in by the war upon governmental administrative personnel have brought about an increased realization of the existence and importance of many social facts upon which efficient and effective mobilization of rural people for concerted action must depend. A recent experience in the establishment and studies of an organization purporting to reach every rural family in the States of New Mexico and Utah convincingly demonstrated this recognition. The organization progressed more rapidly and functioned more satisfactorily where natural groupings or existing patterns of association, locally established leaders, and attitudes and values of the people being mobilized were recognized and utilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imposed desegregation offers a natural situation for exploring the hypothesis that change in the behavior of individuals and groups can be brought about by a change in the social situation in which they are required to function without preceding changes in attitudes and beliefs. Desegregation can be conceptualized as a social psychological problem involving a conflict between external forces and internalized norms. This article studies social situation in a total camp setting, with segregated and desegregated children's groups. To assess individual and group functioning, analyses were made in terms of different levels of response: (1) behavior; (2) social perceptions; (3) group properties; and (4) psychodynamics processes.

This article applies the theoretical model of collective behavior developed by Neil J. Smelser to data derived from diverse sources dealing with events at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. In particular, it focuses on a period of two and a half hours on May 4, 1970, as it looks at events leading to and surrounding the killing of four undergraduate students and the wounding of nine other students. Smelser's system of thought is based on a set of concepts and propositions which can be used to order all variations in collective behavior. The five determinants of collective behavior are structural conduciveness, structural strain, growth of a generalized hostile belief, mobilization of participants for action and operation of social control. Smelser defines hostile outbursts as mobilization for action under a hostile belief. The analysis of the spread of a hostile outburst falls into two categories. Smelser says that any hostile outburst can be looked at as having a real and derived phase. The real or initial phase results from the build-up on conditions prior to the beginning of the outburst. In the derived phase, however, the hostility may become unrelated to conditions giving rise to the initial outburst.

Two Q-sort pools each consisting of 44 trait-descriptive adjectives were set up so as to maximize and minimize the perceivability of the social desirability properties of the constituent items, respectively. Maximization was sought after by selecting items equally interspersed along an S-D continuum as established by a prior normative study. Minimization was approached by selecting items from the relatively more neutral range of the original S-D continuum. It was hypothesized that Q correlation would be higher and SC-ISD scores lower for the S-D maximized condition. Fifty-two subjects participated in the experiment, half sorting each of the two test arrays. All sorts were done in terms of an 11-point rectangular scale, with the self sort coming first followed by the ideal sort one to three days later. Correlations between mean item placement for self and ideal sorts and the normative S-D value of the adjectives were significantly higher in the S-D maximized pool as contrasted with the S-D minimized one, thus supporting the assumption that the procedures followed in setting up these pools did affect S-D perceivability as anticipated.

The article focuses on a study of the mass voting behavior in Great Britain, discussed at the Conference of the British Sociological Association in 1955. The starting point of any study of mass voting behavior must be the discovery of who votes for which party. It was plain from the constituencies that were Liberal and Conservative strongholds that there was a connection between economic geography and political allegiance. An example of the correlation between party allegiance and social characteristics is the influence of Catholicism on voting. Majority of Catholics appear to vote Labor. Catholics are to a disproportionate extent found in the lower income groups, a majority of which vote Labor. Their social class seems an important determinant of their vote than their religious affiliation. It would be interesting to know about party supporters in terms of their acquaintance with public events, in terms of their estimates of the consequences of victory or defeat for their side, in terms of the intensity of their partisanship, and in terms of their views on the range of social, political and economic problems with which the government has to cope. All study of voting behavior is handicapped by the fact that, for most people, voting in a particular election is the continuation of a habit, not the expression of a newly made decision.

The article discusses the problem of the study about the responsiveness of kindergarten children to the behavior of their fellows. The purposes of the study are presented, which includes discovering the behavior characteristics children identify with their fellows, developing a quantitative expression of the degree of social responsiveness in the individual child, and determining the factors influencing children's social responsiveness. The article also offers a review of the literature used in the study.