Herd behavior  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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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.

Raafat, Chater and Frith proposed an integrated approach to herding, describing two key issues, the mechanisms of transmission of thoughts or behavior between individuals and the patterns of connections between them. They suggested that bringing together diverse theoretical approaches of herding behavior illuminates the applicability of the concept to many domains, ranging from cognitive neuroscience to economics.

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