Group Behaviour Meaning - Free Essay Example

Group behavior meaning Group behaviour  in  sociology  refers to the situations where people interact in  large  or  small groups. The field of group dynamics deals with small groups that may reach  consensus  and act in a coordinated way. Groups of a large number of people in a given area may act simultaneously to achieve a goal that differs from what individuals would do acting alone (herd behaviour). A large group (a  crowd  or  mob) is likely to show examples of group behaviour when people gathered in a given place and time act in a similar way—for example, joining aprotest  or march, participating in a  fight  or acting  patriotically. Special forms of large group behaviour are: * crowd  hysteria * spectators when a group of people gathered together on purpose to participate in an event like  theatre  play,  cinema  movie,  football  match, a  concert, etc. * public   exception to the rule that the group must occupy the same physical place. People watching same channel on television may react in the same way, as they are occupying the same type of place in front of television although they may physically be doing this all over the world. Group behaviour differs from  mass actions  which refers to people behaving similarly on a more global scale (for example, shoppers in different shops), while group behaviour refers usually to people in one place. If the group behaviour is coordinated, then it is called  group action. Swarm intelligence  is a special case of group behaviour, referring to the interaction between a group of agents in order to fulfil a given task. This type of group dynamics has received much attention by the  soft computing  community in the form of the  particle swarm optimization  family of algorithms.