Groups

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Groups

• March 31, 2007

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Todays Agenda

• Groups
• Social facilitation, loafing
• Individuation and mobs
• Group decision making
• Groupthink
• Group polarization

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What is a group?

• Group - A collection of individuals that have
  relations to one another that make them
  interdependent to some significant degree.
• Groupness is not binary
• Groups fall along a continuum for how
  interdependent cohesive they are

not a word
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Groups are ubiquitous

• Living in groups is practical
• Protection from predators
• Group hunting
• Food gathering
• Child rearing
• People are a source of information
• What is the world like?
• What am I supposed to do?
• People cant live without other people
• Solitary confinement extremely upsetting
• People have social relationships with others
  resist dissolution of those relationships in all
  cultures

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Social Facilitation

• Definition The effect, positive or negative, of
  the presence of others on performance.
• Initial Research
• Triplett (1898)
• Contradictions
• F. Allport, others
• Reconciliation Zajoncs theory
• Mere presence dominant response

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Fig. 2.1
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Cockroaches invade social psychology
I simply abhor this harsh lighting!
Is it the presence of others, or competition?
Im Bob Zajonc. Meet my little friend Marco
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Cockroach grandstands
Lets all watch Marco run the maze!
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Social Facilitation

• Mere Presence or Evaluation Apprehension?
• Evaluation Apprehension - A concern about how one
  appears in the eyes of others.
• Markus, 1978
• Changing waiting for the experiment to start

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Social Facilitation

• Distraction - Conflict Theory
• Being aware of another persons presence creates
  a conflict between attending to that person and
  attending to the task at hand, and it is this
  attentional conflict that is arousing and creates
  social facilitation effects.
• Facilitation effects from inanimate objects
• Practical Applications
• Monitoring employees
• Rehearsal

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Social loafing

• Reduced individual performance in group task when
  contribution cant be evaluated
• Does loafing interact with task difficulty?
• Gender, culture, and loafing
• Notice that loafing facilitation depend on how
  easily our performance can be attributed to us

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Deindividuation and the Psychology of Mobs

• Sometimes were not ourselves in a group
• Emergent Properties of Groups
• behaviors that only surface when people are in
  groups
• Deindividuation and the Group Mind
• Deindividuation - the reduced sense of individual
  identity accompanied by a diminished
  self-regulation that comes over a person when he
  or she is in a large group
• Closer adherence to group norms

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Deindividuation and the Psychology of Mobs

• Zimbardo (the prison experiment guy)
• Proposed model of deindividuation

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Fig. 2.4
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Halloween Fun

• Diener colleagues (1976)
• Trick-or-treaters instructed to take single piece
  of candy
• Whether came alone or in group recorded
• Gave name or not (randomly assigned)

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Methodological note

• Almost all research on deindividuation is
  correlational or observational
• Two interesting archival studies
• Suicide bating
• Warfare practices

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Suicide bating
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Aggression in war

• Primitive tribes classified into aggressive
  nonaggressive according to Killing, Maiming,
  Mutilating scale
• Some cultures have very limited warfare, others
  very destructive

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Individuation

• Individuation - emphasizing individual identity
  by focusing attention on the self, which will
  generally lead a person to act carefully and
  deliberately in accordance with his or her sense
  of propriety and values.
• Self Awareness and Individuation
• Mirror furthers individuation in halloween study

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Deindividuation and the Psychology of Mobs

• Self-Awareness Theory - a theory that predicts
  that when one focuses attention inward on their
  self, they become concerned with self-evaluation
  and how their current behavior conforms to their
  internal standards and values
• Spotlight Effect - Peoples conviction that
  other people are attending to them more than is
  actually the case

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Group Decision Making

• More minds, better decisions?
• Groupthink - a kind of faulty decision making on
  the part of a highly cohesive group in which the
  critical scrutiny that should be applied to the
  issues at hand is subverted by social pressures
  to reach consensus
• Maintaining group cohesion gets in the way of
  good decision-making

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When does groupthink happen?

• Antecedent Conditions for Groupthink
• high cohesiveness
• insulation of the group
• lack of procedures for search and appraisal
• directive leadership
• high stress

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Symptoms of Groupthink

• illusion of invulnerability
• belief in the inherent morality of the group
• stereotyping the outgroups
• direct pressure on dissenters to conform
• self-censorship
• Illusion of unanimity
• self-appointed mind guards

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Fig. 2.6
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How do you prevent groupthink?

• Play devils advocate
• Bring in outside members
• Do other cultures suffer from groupthink?
• Collectivist cultures

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Group Decision Making

• Does group decision making favor caution or
  bravado?
• Risky Shift - the tendency for groups to make
  riskier decisions than individuals
• Note risk is not always bad!

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Group Decision Making

• Not all group decisions are riskier than those of
  individuals
• The risky shift is part of a larger category
• Group Polarization - the tendency for group
  decisions to be more extreme than those made by
  individuals. Whatever way individuals are
  leaning, group discussion tends to make them lean
  further in that direction.

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Why do we polarize?

• The Persuasive Arguments Account
• More youre exposed to, more convinced you become
• I thought investing in Enron was smart, and there
  are even more reasons to do so than I thought!
• The Social Comparison Interpretation

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Group Decision Making

• Social Comparison Theory - When there isnt an
  objective standard of evaluation or
  comprehension, people evaluate their opinions and
  abilities by comparing themselves to others.
• Heres an example

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Joan and the Iraq war

• Joan thinks withdrawing troops from Iraq is the
  way to go
• Then she discusses it with Bob Gretchen, who
  are also anti-war

This war is BAD!
I must be more anti-war than average

• Now more so than before, Joan sees being opposed
  to the war as a good, desirable thing

She also notices that she is below average in
this good, desirable thing
We need to stay in Iraq
We need to get out now

• Her opinion becomes more extreme, i.e., more
  polarized

Neutral
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Polarization in Modern Life

• People like to think they are correct
• Seek out information that they are correct
• Activists for universal health care talk to other
  activists, not the young republicans
• Extremely easy to find on internet
• Opinion is validated
• Opinion becomes polarized
• Lack of a middle ground

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Thoughts orQuestions?