Collective Psychology

Research in psychology has always acknowledged that people are inherently social animals. Yet the vast majority of research, even in social psychology, has focused on measuring and evaluating psychological processes at the individual level. To understand social behavior, psychologists have traditionally conducted experiments with non-interacting individuals, and extrapolated from individual-level findings to draw conclusions about larger collectives of interacting individuals. More recently, inspired by early social psychologists and powered by new methods and data sources, social scientists have started to explore the nature of psychological processes such as emotion, attention, and memory as distributed processes at the collective level that emerge as a result of social interaction. The goal of this paper is to review the growing research in collective psychology, which encompasses the theories and methodologies designed to understand psychological phenomena at the level of collectives. We begin by defining collective psychology and differentiating it from both traditional social psychology and other domains such as sociology. We then review literature that provides evidence that examining psychology at the collective level generates important and novel insights into the behavior of collectives. Next, we review three principles that uniquely shape collective psychology, whereby collectives are multi-sensing units that adapt to their environments and can take different shapes and structures that influence their psychology. Finally, we provide concrete suggestions for future studies testing each of the proposed principles. Taken together, this paper represents an attempt to shift the focus of social psychology from individuals to collectives.