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This chapter examines social scientists' use of biology in the study of human behavior. The conundrum of the roots of the incest taboo among human beings is surely the most elaborate example of the way biological knowledge has been drawn upon by social scientists. Another application of biology was in the discovery that among some animal species individuals in a group situation arranged themselves in a hierarchical pattern of relations. This study took place during the 1920s.

This chapter is about youth crime and sentencing policy. The “well-known secret” is this: adolescents commit crimes, as they live their lives, in groups. While the empirical evidence for this hypothesis is at least seventy years old, the consequences of this simple and important finding are frequently ignored when we measure crime, pass laws, and postulate theories of criminal activity. The problems associated with ignoring the obvious have grown more serious in recent years, as the study of criminal behavior has shifted from its sociological origins into a wide spectrum of social, behavioral, economic, and policy science disciplinary subspecialties. The chapter is organized into two parts. The first section discusses some evidence on adolescent crime as group behavior that emerged from the pioneering studies of the Chicago School in the 1920s, and supplements this information with more recent crime-specific estimates of group criminality. The second section catalogues some of the things we do not know as a consequence of ignoring the obvious. Ignoring the well-known fact of group involvement causes us to overestimate the amount of crime kids commit, to generate inaccurate models of deterrence and incapacitation, and to overlook the special character of adolescent motives and vulnerabilities in group settings.

Behaviors involving others, whether in their initiation, their enactment, or their consequences, are of particular interest to social psychologists. Not surprisingly, behaviors featuring the intertwining of outcomes of actors can be a theoretical and measurement challenge. This chapter introduces a section of the book containing a number of chapters that focus on behavior, both broadly and specifically defined, and inter-individual processes. This section provides readers with a thorough sense of the many ways in which behavior is considered in social psychological theory and research. Each of the chapters highlights the complexities and the challenges inherent in the study of inter-individual behavior. At the same time, each reflects the genuine enthusiasm of those whose own scholarly motivation and actions push us closer to a more complete understanding of the underpinnings and nuances of behavior in its various forms.

This chapter explores the processes of social group behaviour, which are often analysed through a social psychological perspective that tends to see organizations as having shared purposes or as having ‘politics’ of a relatively minor kind. This perspective is then placed in a wider critical analysis of the politics of organizations. It is useful to take as examples cases where things go wrong. However, many of the same processes underlie ‘success’ as well as ‘failure’. There is a need to grasp how failure occurs but then aim to identify what is generic in the politics of organizations and what is particular to failure. With this approach in place, one can then ask how organizations might learn from experiences of success and failure and what organizational learning might mean. The concept of groupthink is also discussed, along with decision-making as a rational process, escalation as group psychology, escalation as a failure of rationality, and persistence.

This chapter focuses on racialized social constraint's ability to increase political action in support of the Democratic Party and its candidates. To demonstrate the existence of an in-group norm of active support, the chapter turns once again to data about the race of the interviewer. It then pushes deeper into the causal process of racialized social constraint using a lab-in-the-field experiment that can directly test the effect of racialized social pressure on blacks' willingness to engage in political action. Using the behavior of contributions to the Obama campaign as a black group-norm-consistent behavior, and using personal monetary incentives to defect from this norm to induce a self-interest conflict, the chapter varies whether black study participants must make their choice in front of another person who has made their own political choice clear, as well as whether that person is a racial in-group member. As a result, social pressure from other blacks uniquely reduces self-interested behavior and results in greater group-norm-consistent political behavior. Importantly, the chapter also shows that social pressure from other blacks only works to increase group-norm-consistent behavior. It does not encourage defection.

This chapter discusses the role of speculation in the financial markets that influences individual and group behavior in the form of bubbles and crashes. The chapter highlights behavioral finance issues associated with bubbles, such as overconfidence, herding, group polarization, groupthink effect, representativeness bias, familiarity issues, grandiosity, excitement, and the overreaction and underreaction to prices. These issues are important for understanding past financial mistakes because history often repeat itself. The chapter also examines the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 on investor psychology, including the impact of a severe financial downturn, anchoring effect, recency bias, worry, loss averse behavior, status quo bias, and trust. The aftermath of the financial crisis might have negative long-term effects on investor psychology in which some investors remain overly risk averse, resulting in under-investment in stocks and over-investment in cash and bonds.

The population approach to understanding cultural change begins with the premise that culture constitutes a system of inheritance. Since cultural change is a population process, this chapter explores Darwinian methods in studying cultural change. In addition, the chapter contends that an increase in the rate at which a population adapts can cause qualitative changes in the nature of the adaptations that characterize that population. This chapter begins by briefly reviewing population-based models of cultural evolution developed by one's self and others. This approach is then used to argue that rapid cultural change leads to more accurate adaptation to local ecological conditions, greater variation among groups in social behaviour, the evolution of group-beneficial behaviours, and the subdivision of human populations into stylistically marked groups. Therefore, cultural adaptation can lead to different long-run evolutionary outcomes compared to genetic adaptation.

This chapter discusses the different strengths, challenges, and potential extensions of the Movement Structure Theory (MST). In MST, the key distinction is the number of significant groups, which determines whether the movement is internally competitive or noncompetitive. This aspect of movement structure drives group incentives and movement dynamics, which together drive group behavior and movement outcome. Alliances have comparatively little impact. In an alliance, individuals are generally loyal to their groups first. Individual group leadership maintains ultimate decision-making power, even if groups agree to try to coordinate certain actions. The power concentrated in a single alliance is therefore far less cohesive in organization, coherent in action, and stable in alignment than a single group. These factors make a movement with a unifying alliance somewhat different from a fragmented movement with no such ties but very different from a hegemonic movement with a single dominant group.

This chapter examines why markets and economies behave as they do from a sociological perspective. Sociology is the study of how people function in society, with the ultimate hope of understanding group behavior. When we stop to consider that all the participants in a market constitute a group, it is obvious that until we understand group behavior, we can never fully understand how markets and economies work. All of the areas of social science—sociology, political science, economics, and the several subdisciplines within each—are, in one sense, only different platforms from which to think about one large question: how human beings form themselves into groups, or societies, and how those groups behave. This chapter analyzes social systems by focusing on a large number of complex adaptive systems across a wide variety of fields in both the natural and the social sciences. It also discusses complexity theory as well as the concepts of self-organization and emergent behavior as they apply to finance and investing.

This chapter examines the question of whether cognitive states should be attributed to groups. The chapter investigates the explanatory power that cognitive states have insofar as collective actions are concerned. They seem to have such power in folk explanations. The chapter, however, argues that there are a number of disanalogies. First, none of us has first-person access to group attitudes. Second, group actions can be explained more parsimoniously in terms of individual attitudes. The chapter goes on to argue that cognitive science has not provided any evidence in favor of group attitudes. Furthermore, group behavior in animals can be explained in terms of individual cognitive processes. All of these considerations are broadly epistemic. And none of them support the idea that groups can have cognitive states.

This chapter on the Palestinian national movement examines the impact of hierarchy on group behavior. It uses a variety of tight within-case comparisons, in which the shifting of variables at different times allows for powerful assessments of why groups such as Fatah, the PFLP, and the Jordanian Communist Party used or restrained violence at different periods in their history. The chapter also illustrates “the tragedy of national movements”: Palestinian groups knew they needed hegemony to succeed, but their desire for power kept them largely fragmented. Regardless of changes in time or space, the Palestinian national movement met with strategic failure when the movement was fragmented (1965–1973, 1975–1985, and 2001–2016); limited success when it was united (1974); and its greatest success when the movement was hegemonic (1986–1993 and 1995–2000).

Many important phenomena in social and developmental psychology can be understood as manifestations of a common set of cognitive structures: a coalitional psychology. The functions of this coalition psychology is to infer the actual and potential alliance relationships between people; generate expectations of how those individuals are likely to act and react; and initiate and engage in these alliance relationships. This chapter argues that many “group” phenomena—race, lexically marked ethnic kinds, minimal groups—can be understood as the output of this coalitional psychology. Recent findings are converging on this idea, and the remainder of the chapter reviews these findings.

This concluding chapter highlights the distinctive feature of the three cases—their claim that a suprahuman presence was involved in the emergence process—and discusses its implications for understanding emergent groups and the creative process. It argues that each of these suprahuman “presences” was motivated by an expansive vision and was intent on guiding the human collaborators toward a goal—a restored church, a fellowship of recovering alcoholics, and a metaphysical training program. Belief in these presences and their interest in guiding the group not only stabilized the process and structured the group, but also supported claims regarding the authorship of the key texts and the ultimate origins of the group. The chapter also considers key aspects of Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.