Group behavior

Group behavior in sociology refers to the situations where people work together in large or small groups. The field of group dynamics deals with small groups that may reach harmony and act in a synchronized way.

A large number of people in groups in a given region may act at the same time to achieve an objective which differs from what individuals would do acting alone (herd behaviour). A large group (a crowd or mob) is expected to show examples of group behavior when people gathered in a given place and time act in a similar way. Joining a protest or rally, march, participating in a fight or acting patriotically would be some of examples.

Special forms of large group behaviour are:

• A huge mass of people, madness
• Viewers - when a group of people assembled together for some purpose e.g. to participate in an event like play, watch movie, tennis match, a concert, etc.
• Public - exception to the rule that the group must occupy the same physical place. People watching similar channel in television may respond in the same way, as they are occupying the same type of place - in front of television – even though they may physically be doing this all over the world.

Group behavior differs from group actions which refers to inhabitants behaving similarly on a more global scale (for example, shoppers in different shops), while group behaviour refers usually to people in one place. If the group behavior is coordinated, then it is called group action.

A special case in group behavior is the Swarm intelligence which refers to the interaction between groups of agents in order to fulfill a given job. This type of group dynamics has received much concentration by the soft computing community in the form of the particle swarm optimization family of algorithms.

Most of the financially viable decisions are taken by people acting within, and very often on behalf of groups. There are a range of less formal groups like neighborhood or associations and networks of producers which play vital role in influencing the behavior and outcomes.

Questions

• What are the economic interactions in which the group behavior is involved?
• What is the role of group functions in group behavior?