Collective Consciousness - Other Uses of The Term

Other Uses of The Term

Various forms of what might be termed "collective consciousness" in modern societies have been identified by other sociologists, such as Mary Kelsey, going from solidarity attitudes and memes to extreme behaviors like groupthink or herd behavior. Mary Kelsey, sociology lecturer in the University of California, Berkeley, used the term in the early 2000s to describe people within a social group, such as mothers, becoming aware of their shared traits and circumstances, and as a result acting as a community and achieving solidarity. Rather than existing as separate individuals, people come together as dynamic groups to share resources and knowledge.

It has also developed as a way of describing how an entire community comes together to share similar values. This has also been termed "hive mind", "group mind" and "social mind".

Society is made up of various collective groups, such as the family, community, organisations, regions, nations which as Burns and Egdahl state "can be considered to possess agential capabilities: to think, judge, decide, act, reform; to conceptualise self and others as well as self's actions and interactions; and to reflect."(italics in the original). Burns and Egdahl note that during the second world war different nations behaved differently towards their Jewish populations. The Jewish populations of Bulgaria and Denmark survived whereas the majority of the Jewish populations in Slovakia and Hungary did not survive the Holocaust. It is suggested that these different national behaviours vary according to the different collective consciousness between nations. This illustrates that differences in collective consciousness can have practical significance.

Edmans, Garcia, and Norlia examined national sporting defeats and correlated them with decreases in the value of stocks. They examined 1,162 football matches in thirty-nine countries, and discovered that stock markets dropped on average forty-nine points after being eliminated from the World Cup, and thirty-one points after being eliminated in other tournaments. Edmans, Garcia, and Norli found similar but smaller effects with international cricket, rugby, ice hockey, and basketball games.

The term has also been used by some parapsychologists. The psychologist Gardner Murphy proposed that a person's mind might survive death in a fragmentary state and merge itself into a collective consciousness. Murphy had opposed the idea that an individual mind with personality as an entity would survive, instead he claimed the mind and all of its memories would merge itself into a larger field of consciousness. He wrote there would be no personal ego left but the consciousness would be able to take on new qualities.