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This study presents the outline of a model for collective phenomena. A symmetry‐breaking model combines a number of well‐established social psychology hypotheses with recent concepts of statistical physics. Specifically we start out from the regularities obtained in studies on the polarization of attitudes and decisions. From a strictly logical point of view, it is immediately clear that aggregation effects must be analysed separately from group effects as such. The conceptual analysis of the assumed mechanisms reveals that when we deal with phenomena that have until now been designated as polarization phenomena, we are faced not with a single phenomenon, as was believed hitherto, but with a whole class of phenomena. For this reason it would be appropriate to deal with them differentially both from an empirical and from a theoretical point of view. It is possible to show, moreover, that in principle polarization …