FINAL: Ch. 18 Social Change and Collective Behavior Flashcards
Societal alterations with long-term and relatively important consequences
Social change
Loss or lack of stability or equilibrium.
Disequlibrium
Describes what happens in a social system when the cultural ideas used to regulate life do not keep pace with other social changes
Cultural lag
Civilizations rise and fall rater than develop in a straight line
Cyclical theory
Societies are constantly moving toward improvement
Evolutionary theory
Spontaneous and unstructured social behavior of people who are responding to similar stimuli
Collective behavior
Participants in the less-structured forms of collective behavior such as rumors, panics, and fads
Dispersed collectivities
The form of collective behavior in which general social anxiety is created by acceptance of one or more false beliefs
Mass hysteria
Collective behavior that occurs when people react to a genuine threat in fearful, anxious, and often self-damaging ways
Panic
A temporary collection of people who share an immediate common interest
Crowd
The theory of crowd behavior that emphasizes the irrationality of crowds that is created by participants stimulating one another to higher and higher levels of emotional intensity
Contagion theory
The theory of crowd behavior that stresses the similarity between typical, everyday social behavior and crowd behavior
Emergent norm theory
The theory that crowds are formed by people who deliberately congregate with others whom they know to be like-minded
Convergence theory
A large number of people acting together with some degree of leadership and organization over a relatively long period with the foal of promoting or preventing social change
Social movement
