Collective Behavior Case Study

In the following paper I will make a recount of the event that was the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and I will use the terms that refers to Collective Behavior to explain some action take after the disaster occurred. Collective Behavior is the accountability for people actions as the come together. In another words this is the process of labeling the actions of group of people.
Following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina people left in the city were face with the reality that resource were few and that social norm was out of the window. “Wenger uses the terms emergency and crisis for the classification and analysis of disasters. In general terms, emergency situations are those in which traditional and existing social arrangements are sufficient to overcome the problems posed by disaster agents. On the other hand, crisis situations are those in which new social arrangements must be forged in order to overcome these problems.” (pg. 299)
People began to act out of the ordinary by using force or violence to survive. Blumer mentions the term for this condition is call Mental Unity, which is when people in crowds faced with an unknown or unique situation are unsure of how to act. People often tend to react in the same way as they see other act, so if some or starts to act violent and or looting …show more content…
Late on we found that although some criminal acts did occur in the city, many reports were also exaggerations by the news reported, inflating the citation to create news. Several of main networks that reported on to issue made retractions because of all exaggerations about the crime