From Social Mood to Collective Events: Measuring the Path by Sociometers

Abstract

How a population/group feels about its future, its so-called “social mood”, and how that mood biases collective events of all types is the focus of this article. Through a variety of “sociometers” running from fashion styles to financial markets behaviour, the paper argues that the social mood dramatically influences the types of events we can expect to see on all time scales. The financial market price movement serve as possibly the best sociometer for measuring the social mood on all time scales. Additionally, I present arguments showing that there is virtually no feedback from events to mood; that is, the social mood is endogeneous to the population and is not determined by any sort of “outside forces”. I hypothesize that it may be mainly determined by “internal ideology” of a group that may be unobvious to its members. Finally, the paper concludes with a research program for turning the hypotheses advanced here into a full-fledged scientific theory of collective human behaviour.