Crowd and collective behaviour: social factors

Social loafing

It seems that people, when working in a group, individually put in less effort. This reduced effort can be understood in terms of deindividuation- being in a group reduces personal identity, so no one needs to work as hard because no one will know what the other peoples contribution is.

Bibb Latané what is one of the psychologists who investigated social loafing. in his study 84 male undergraduates were asked to shout as loudly as they could, either on their own with one other person, or in a group of 6. When participants were in a large group, they individually made less noise that if they were on their own.

latané added a second condition to the experiment, where participants wore blindfolds and headsets. What they heard was a synchronised tape recording of six people shouting. in this condition The noise per person was greater than when they were actually in a real group of six.

In condition one (the real group) reduced group performance was due to both coordination losses and effort losses in condition two (the tape-recording group) It was just less effort put in.

Evaluation: one weakness with this explanation is that the negative effects of group work do not apply to all kinds of tasks. For example, creative tasks, such as brainstorming actually benefit from a group of people working together. This shows that in some tasks, the output from a group is often greater than the sum of individuals in the group.

Culture

People in individualist cultures such as the US and the UK are focused on individual needs. Decisions, For example, about your friends or your job tend to be based on what will be the best outcome for you. in more collectivist cultures, such as China and Korea decisions are made with reference to the needs of the group- families and society in general.

It makes sense that social loafing is likely to be lower in a collectivist society. Research is supported this, for example in one study US and Chinese participants were compared on two types of group task. In one group task, They were individually identifiable and in another group task they weren’t. The individual effort was the same on both tasks for the Chinese participants, but not for the Americans. As soon as they thought they would be individually assessed they increased their effort whereas the Chinese people put the same effort in whether it was for themselves or the group.

Evaluation: one weakness with this explanation is that we are making generalisations about a country. People vary considerably within a country. For example, people in the US do not simply belong to one culture. They are Americans, but they also may belong to a religious group which holds certain values or may belong to the Democrat party, which again holds certain values. It is simplistic to talk about national cultures and make predictions about behaviour.

Dispositional factors

Personality

We have already considered locus of control as an explanation for higher or lower levels of conformity. people with an internal locus of control are less likely to be influenced by the behaviour of others when in a crowd, they would be more likely to follow their personal norms than the social norms created by the others around them.

Evaluation: one weakness, with this explanation is that not all research has shown that personality matters. One study, looked at ‘whistleblowing’. when one person is willing to speak out, despite the silence of the crowd. Participants were tested to see if they would report researchers for conducting an unethical study, people who are willing to speak out, (i.e. they blew the whistle) had very similar scores on a personality test to those who didn’t blow the whistle.

This suggests that personality, may be a weak explanation for why some people conform to group norms, i.e. it may not be a useful explanation for crowd and collective behaviour.

Morality

‘Morals’, are ideas of right and wrong. Some people have a greater ‘moral strength’, which means they believe in certain principles of right and wrong, and are more willing to be guided by these principles than being concerned about their own welfare, or the opinion of others. This means that people with high moral strength will be less affected by the social norm created by the crowd.

We have already looked at comments from some of the participants in Milgram’s obedience studies. One of the participants was a professor of religion who refused to go farther than 150 V. saying: ‘I don’t understand why this experiment is placed above this persons life… if he doesn’t want to continue, I’m taking orders from him… if one has as one’s ultimate authority God, it trivialises human authority’.

The professors ability to resist the social pressure of what everyone else is doing, is due to a strong sense of moral responsibility.

Evaluation: one strength of this explanation is that it is supported by historical evidence of individuals who stood up to crowd behaviour. For example, in 1943, in Nazi Germany, a young woman called Sophie Scholl was tried and found guilty of circulating anti-Nazi literature. She has been described as the most spectacular example of resistance to group pressure, standing up for what she believed to be right at a great personal cost. just before her execution, at the age of 21, she said: ‘what does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted?’ this shows that some people are willing to sacrifice their life for a principle and the good of others.