The Dynamic Context of Transformations through Crowds and Collective Action

Abstract:Historically, social psychologists have conceptualized the crowd and its members as mindless and irrational. More recent research has emphasized the crowd as an agentic space that offers both emergence and endurance of psychological transformations, as related to social identity. Using a social identity approach, models have taken the social context (inter- and intragroup interaction) into account to explain transformations through crowd participation. We argue for the need to include wider contextual dimensions (including physical, political, and economic) to understand crowd participation and transformative dynamics through collective action across geographical, ideological, and state contexts.