Behavior Of Crowds

Everett Dean Martin presented in this book what he saw as the dilemma of the modern age: a technological information revolution that made it possible, in the absence of an adequate educational system, to influence ignorant men and women with propaganda and half-truths. Everett Dean Martin was an American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, and an advocate of adult education.

In 'The Behavior of Crowds,' Everett Dean Martin delves into the intricate dynamics of crowd psychology and the susceptibility of the masses to propaganda, particularly in the context of the rapidly evolving technological landscape of the modern era. His work is a piercing examination of how information, or the lack thereof, can be wielded to shape public opinion and behavior. The book is distinguished by its probing analysis, eloquent style, and the ability to place its insights within the broader literary tradition of social critique, reminding readers of the works of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter, while also anticipating later twentieth-century thinkers like Eric Hoffer. Everett Dean Martin, with his background as a minister, journalist, and social psychologist, brings to bear a unique interdisciplinary approach in understanding the mechanisms of groupthink and mass influence. His advocacy for adult education reflects his concern for an informed citizenry and underpins this seminal work. The observations in 'The Behavior of Crowds' are a direct outcome of his extensive career spent at the intersection of education, social philosophy, and public discourse. 'The Behavior of Crowds' is a must-read for students of social psychology, historians of the early twentieth century, and anyone interested in the intersection of technology, media, and society. Martin's work provides both a timeless exploration of human behavior in collective settings and a poignant commentary relevant to contemporary discussions on the power of influence, media literacy, and the role of education in developing critical thinking skills.

Group and Crowd Behavior for Computer Vision provides a multidisciplinary perspective on how to solve the problem of group and crowd analysis and modeling, combining insights from the social sciences with technological ideas in computer vision and pattern recognition. The book answers many unresolved issues in group and crowd behavior, with Part One providing an introduction to the problems of analyzing groups and crowds that stresses that they should not be considered as completely diverse entities, but as an aggregation of people. Part Two focuses on features and representations with the aim of recognizing the presence of groups and crowds in image and video data. It discusses low level processing methods to individuate when and where a group or crowd is placed in the scene, spanning from the use of people detectors toward more ad-hoc strategies to individuate group and crowd formations. Part Three discusses methods for analyzing the behavior of groups and the crowd once they have been detected, showing how to extract semantic information, predicting/tracking the movement of a group, the formation or disaggregation of a group/crowd and the identification of different kinds of groups/crowds depending on their behavior. The final section focuses on identifying and promoting datasets for group/crowd analysis and modeling, presenting and discussing metrics for evaluating the pros and cons of the various models and methods. This book gives computer vision researcher techniques for segmentation and grouping, tracking and reasoning for solving group and crowd modeling and analysis, as well as more general problems in computer vision and machine learning. Presents the first book to cover the topic of modeling and analysis of groups in computer vision Discusses the topics of group and crowd modeling from a cross-disciplinary perspective, using social science anthropological theories translated into computer vision algorithms Focuses on group and crowd analysis metrics Discusses real industrial systems dealing with the problem of analyzing groups and crowds

["THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS" by Evrett Martin with his essay entitled "THE MOB MIND VS. CIVIL LIBERTY" in the POSTFACE.] The "motivation" of this book is the author's conviction that crowd formation and crowd thinking are daily becoming a more serious menace to civilization. "I know of nothing," he says, "which today so menaces, not only the values of civilization, but also - it is the same thing in other words, perhaps - the achievement of personality and true knowledge of self as the growing habit of behavior as crowds." Few students of social psychology will be disposed to deny the danger, or fail to share the author's apprehension. The crowd (not the group) is a social nuisance, and the formation of crowds is made increasingly easy by the rapid development of the technique of intercommunication. (...) But is crowd behavior really psychopathic? Is crowd-mindedness really a disease? If so, it is practically universal, for there are few indeed who are not affected by the influence of one or more crowds. We are all crowd men more or less. Would it not be more accurate to say that crowd behavior is analogous in some respects to that of the neurotic? It certainly sometimes resembles that of the lunatic! But there is nothing pathological, strictly or "in a sense," in, for instance, the antics of a college crowd celebrating a football victory. Such phenomena are wholly explicable on the basis of normal instincts and impulses. (...) Reference of crowd motivation to the unconscious is, of course, as the author is well aware, nothing new. He quotes a page from Le Bon in which that author says, "It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious .... that in crowds become common property." But this book probes deeper than Le Bon. It makes practically no use of the suggestion-imitation principle. Many will regard this as a weakness. The author admits that suggestion and imitation do play a larger part in determining our thinking, but he sees "no reason why they should be more operative in causing the crowd-mind than in other social situations". Is it not because the crowd, in which the attention of many is strongly and narrowly focused and the emotions abnormally stimulated, presents a social situation peculiarly conducive to their operation? None of the foregoing observations are designed to belittle the value of this book or its method. Merely as a revealer of the dangers of crowd formation and crowd thinking, of the hypocrisies, insincerities, and asininities of crowds, and the necessity of a new method of education to counteract their influence and to prevent their formation, it is one of the best books on the subject thus far published. No student of social psychology can afford to overlook it. Its wide reading by the public would be an excellent antidote to crowd formation and the dangers of crowd thinking. - Ira Woods Howerth, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 1.

Crowd behavior is one of the most colorful but least understood forms of human social behavior. This volume is a major contribution to the field of collective behavior, with implications for social movement analysis.McPhail's critical assessment of the major theories of crowd behavior establishes that, whatever their particular limitations and strengths, all share a general and serious flaw: their explanations were developed without prior examination of the behaviors to be explained. Drawing on a wide range of empirical studies that include his own careful field work, the author offers a new characterization of temporary gatherings. He presents a life cycle of gatherings and a taxonomy of forms of collective behavior within gatherings, as well as combinations of these forms and gatherings into larger events, campaigns and waves. McPhail also develops a new explanation for various ways in which purposive actors construct collective actions.

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.