Herbert Blumer used Robert E Park's term "collective behavior" to refer to social processes and events which fall outside existing social structure, but which emerge spontaneously (Collective). He used the term to refer to such events as religious revivals, panics in burning buildings, swastika spray painting outbursts, and body piercing fads. They are instances of crowd behavior, but do not necessarily take place in the same place or at the same time. Blumer saw crowds as emotional, but as capable of any emotion, either anger and fear or pleasure and ecstasy.
Blumer made the distinction between a crowd, in which an emotion is disseminated, and a public, in which a single issue is discussed (Collective). For each issue being discussed at a particular time, there is a public, and so there are many publics, each coming into being when a particular issue is raised, and disbanding when the issue is resolved. Blumer was one of very few psychologists to treat this kind of group as a form of collective behavior. Blumer had a third type of collective behavior which he called "mass" behavior (Collective). This differs from a crowd or a public, and is not defined by a form of interaction. By "mass" Blumer referred to such things as "mass media" - participants in the mass receive messages from the media which is attempting to persuade them to choose one product over another, for instance. There is no discussion or event, but there is simultaneous and independent action of the participants, and their aggregated choices can have a powerful effect on society. Blumer also had a fourth form of collective behavior - the social movement, whether it be a revolution, the war on drugs, or the American Civil Rights Movement. Social movements are distinguished from other collective behaviors in that they have structure and are persistent. Their continuation is dependent on the interactions between the individuals in the movements, and in sup...