collectivity

Collectivity refers to the quality or state of existing, acting, or being regarded as a collective: a system whose behavior cannot be fully understood by examining its members in isolation. It denotes emergent properties and dynamics that arise from interactions among parts, producing patterns, norms, or structures at the group or system level.

In the social sciences, collectivity is used to describe how individuals form social entities such as crowds, publics, or social movements. Collective phenomena emerge from shared beliefs, identities, routines, and institutions, and are studied in terms of collective action, collective memory, and social norms. Researchers examine how coordination, leadership, communication, and incentives shape collective outcomes, such as protests, vote coalitions, or community mobilization.

In physics and biology, collectivity describes coherent behavior of many components. In physics, collective excitations like phonons or plasmons arise from coordinated motion of many particles; in condensed matter, superconductivity and superfluidity are collective states. In biology, flocking, swarming, or herding illustrate collective motion governed by simple local rules that yield complex global patterns.

Although related, collectivity is distinct from individualism or mere aggregation. It emphasizes group-level properties and processes such as collective intentionality, common purpose, or distributed decision-making. The term is used across disciplines to highlight how wholes exhibit characteristics that cannot be reduced to their parts alone.