Group Processes — chapter 9

What is a group?

Which of these are

meaningful

groups?

 Members of your fraternity/sorority  Your family  Members of the St. Louis Cardinals  Fans watching a Cardinals game  Males  Social psychologists  A group of people occupying the same elevator  People who like watching The Sopranos  People who own sexy red sports cars  People who wear glasses  People who wear

funny looking

glasses  People who notice other people’s funny-looking glasses  People who are sick of my “funny glasses” example

An index of “groupiness”:

entitativity (Campbell, 1958)  what specific factors lead to perceptions of high entitativity?  At least three: – Similarity, interaction, common goals

Which of these are

meaningful

groups?

 Members of your fraternity/sorority  Your family  Members of the St. Louis Cardinals  Fans watching a Cardinals game  Males  Social psychologists  A group of people occupying the same elevator  People who like watching The Sopranos  People who own sexy red sports cars  People who wear glasses  People who wear

funny looking

glasses  People who notice other people’s funny-looking glasses  People who are sick of my “funny glasses” example

Social facilitation

Public Classic paradigms in social facilitation

 Perform task in P

rivate

, versus:  “co-actor”  “audience” (you plus others watching)

First known study: Triplett (1898)

Brief overview of social facilitation literature  Is performance improved or impaired in “public” (audience or co-actor) conditions ?

 Decades of confusing results  Resolution: Zajonc (1965) –

Dominant (habitual, well-learned) responses more likely in public

If dominant response yields correct answer: helps performance If dominant response yields incorrect answer: hurts performance

Zajonc study



Pronounce words between 1 and 16 times

– Creates “dominant” response:  Words pronounced most frequently = dominant 

Words flashed very quickly: 1/100 second

– Participants guess word 

If others are present, more likely to guess “dominant” words



Findings replicated across dozens of studies

Is social facilitation peculiar to human beings?

 Zajonc believed that his theory applied not just to humans, but other species as well (!)  If so, this would be one of the very few, if not the only, social psychological theories to show such generalization

The cockroach study

(Zajonc, Heingartner, & Herman, 1969)  Cockroaches placed in runway  Bright light shown  Run to other end of runway to escape light  Cockroach “spectators” or not  Perform faster with spectators  But only if maze is simple

Social Loafing

 Output of individual is diminished when working in a group  Ringelmann--rope pulling – Clapping, cheering  Why no social facilitation?

Individual efforts can be evaluated

SOCIAL FACILITATION

Arousal/ distraction Enhanced performance on simple tasks

Presence of others

Impaired performance on complex tasks

SOCIAL LOAFING

Individual efforts cannot be evaluated Little arousal/evaluation apprehension Impaired performance on simple tasks relaxation Enhanced performance on complex tasks

Jackson and Williams (1986)

 Simple vs. complex mazes on computer  Another participant worked on identical task in other room  Researcher: – Each performance would be evaluated separately, or – Computer would average scores (no accountability)

Time to complete maze (long) evaluation No evaluation Typically produces arousal Arousal impedes performance here (fast) Arousal facilitates performance here easy Difficulty of mazes difficult

Individual differences in social loafing

 Men, more than women  Individualistic societies  Suggests that key factor is interdependent view of the self

Deindividuation

exercise

If you could be totally invisible for 24 hours and were completely assured that you would not be detected or held responsible for your actions, what would you do?

Theories of Deindividuation

Original view:

loosening of normal constraints on behavior when people are in a crowd Leading to…

“mob behavior” Robert Watson (1973) study

Newer view of Deindividuation



Two factors

– Lower accountability – Increases obedience to “local” norms

Groups: Decision Making

Initial issues

 Most major decisions in the world are made by groups – United Nations, Courts (e.g. U.S. Supreme Court) – Elected bodies (e.g. Parliament, Congress) – Presidents rarely make decisions completely alone  WHY?

 Are groups

always

better than single individuals?

– Huge scientific literature on exactly this question!

Process loss

 General term covering many group processes  – Hamper extent to which groups can solve problems efficiently, effectively “Social” losses – – Conversation/interactions irrelevant to task Distractions  Failure to share unique information – Stasser & Titus (1985)



Groupthink

Probably most famous process loss  Definition: people begin to value group cohesiveness and solidarity more than the need to consider the facts in a realistic manner.  Can lead to disastrous decisions – JFK’s decision to invade Cuba – Challenger disaster (1986) – Possibly, Columbia accident (2003)

The road to groupthink

Antecedents

– Group is (already) cohesive – – Isolated Directive leader – – Stress Poor decision-making rules

Symptoms

– – Illusion of invulnerability Moral certainty – – – – – Stereotyped view of outgroup Self-censorship Direct pressure to conform Illusion of unanimity Mindguards

Defective decision making

– Incomplete survey of alternatives – Failure to examine risks of favored alternative – Poor information search – Few contingency plans

Specific steps to avoid groupthink

 Leader—remain impartial (if possible)  Seek outside opinions  Create subgroups  Seek anonymous opinions

Group polarization

 Original finding (Stone, 1962) seemed to suggest “risky shift” (!!)  Newer view: group polarization, not riskiness per se – Whatever way the group is leaning initially, members tend to polarize further in that direction

Who (and what) makes a great



leader?

The “holy grail” of social psychology!

 Two general views – 1. The “great person” theory –  Leadership and personality – Fascinating study by Dean Simonton on U.S. presidents –

General picture—no such thing as “leadership personality”

2. “Right person in right situation” view  Contingency theory of leadership  Received good support  Gender and leadership

Social dilemmas

What’s best for the individual is not always best for the group, and vice-versa.

Examples of social dilemmas

 Common goods dilemma – Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968)  Contribution to public television/radio  The Matzo ball soup dilemma  Stephen King’s on-line novel--The Plant King issued the installments under an honor-system payment model, asking readers to pay for $l for each chapter downloaded and promising to keep writing only if at least 75% of the readers complied. "If you pay, the story rolls. If you don't, the story folds," he wrote on his Web site. But King staffers said that only 46% of the downloads of the first few chapter were paid for, and the experiment was suspended.

Why social dilemmas are common

 Dilemmas could be avoided if people put their total trust in others and if they weren’t so selfish –

Yeah, right….

 Not to say that social dilemmas are inevitable  But they are hard to resist