ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Floyd Allport's and Neal Miller and John Dollard's explanations of crowd behaviour. Allport offered the first sustained critique of the transformation perspective while, at the same time, providing some experimental evidence for his alternative theory of the social facilitation of individual responses. Miller and Dollard were the first to offer a systematic, cumulative theory of individual and crowd behaviour, including their deprivation-frustration-aggression hypothesis, which was widely adopted to explain the incidence of and participation in violent crowds. Allport's and Miller and Dollard's explanations were influential because they were reflections of and contributions to a view of human behaviour that came to be dominant in the twentieth century, viz., that behaviour is a function of innate or acquired predispositions to behave that individuals carry within them from place to place, and require only a situational stimulus to trigger the predisposed response.
