In forms of collective behavior such as riots and crowd behaviors, dispersing people is important to ending the behavior because it destroys the crowd's reinforcement of the behavior. One of the newer forms of collective behavior is a form of urban legend spread by e-mail. There are a number of rumors about computer viruses, telephone scams, etc., that are hoaxes for every actual e-mailed virus. While these are almost always hoaxes, thousands of people receive these. The internet continues to have the potential to widely circulate rumors about other impending disasters, warning people to stockpile food and cash, find ways to use alternative fuels for heating and cooking, etc.
Social movements are more organized forms of collective action.
There are five basic types of social movements, of which four identify what they want, while the fifth identifies what it does not want. The four types that identify what they want are indicated in the following table, which also identifies what they want and at what level. Revolutions are inherently disruptive to people's lives because they require people to accept new beliefs, reject old values and adopt new ones, change how they behave, and reorganize and reorient many of their groups. The Russian revolution, for example, overthrew not only the feudal political system, it overthrew the Russian Orthodox religion, the existing economic system, and the existing education system as well. The initial political overthrow of the formal czarist government was followed by years of civil war to do the work of overthrowing the rest of the formal systems.