ABSTRACT
On July 2, 2003, at 7:07 p.m., at the tail end of the rush hour in Manhattan, the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, fronting Forty-Second Street next to Grand Central Station, was nearly empty. A few guests sat in armchairs around the lobby. In twos and threes and small groups people began slipping into the lobby from the street, milling around the lobby making small talk, until there were around two hundred people in the lobby. All at once, they rode the elevators and escalators to the mezzanine level and wordlessly lined the banister looking down into the lobby, staring at where they had just been. After five minutes staring at the lobby, they erupted into precisely fifteen seconds of tumultuous applause and then scattered downstairs and out the doors to the street. This was one of the first flash mobs organized by Bill Wasik of Harper’s Magazine. The participants, who did not know beforehand who else would be participating, were recruited by email to participate in “an inexplicable mob of people in New York City.” What they did, they intended to do, they did it together, and they did it intentionally. It is possible to imagine the same people entering the lobby in the same way in the same groups and milling around and making small talk in the same way, without the members of that group doing anything together intentionally. It is even possible to imagine them all making their way to the mezzanine at the same time and lining the banister and applauding, without their intending to be doing anything together. The same people, the same movements can on one occasion be a random collection of individual actions and on another a collective intentional activity. Since everything about their behavior can be the same—though on one occasion they act together intentionally, while on another they do not—the difference has to lie in their attitudes. The difference between their forming a group oriented toward joint action, a social unit, and a random group of people rests on how they are thinking about what they are doing together. That difference is the central focus of the study of collective intentionality.
