Chapter 8: Group Influence

What is a Group?

What are groups, and why do people join them?

Group- two or more people who, for longer than a few moments, interact with and influence one another and perceive one another as “us”

Why Do People Join Groups?

  • Forming relationships with other people fulfills a number of basic human needs

  • Groups have a number of benefits:

    • Important source of information:

      • Help us resolve ambiguity in the social world

    • Important aspect of identity:

      • Help us define who we are

      • Help us feel distinct from other groups

    • Establishment of social norms

Social Roles

Shared expectations in a group about how particular people are supposed to behave in that group

  • Ex.

    • Professor vs. Student

    • Parent vs. Child

    • Guard vs. Prisoner

Individual Behavior in a Group Setting

In what ways do individuals perform differently when other

  • Social faciliation- people do better on simple tasks, and worse on complex tasts, when they are in the presence of others and their individual performance can be evaluated

    • Strengthening of dominant responses whether correct or incorrect in the presence of others

    • If the task is simple, well-learned

      • The mere presence of others improves performance

      • This phenomenon is found in humans as well as other species

    • Triplett (1898) asked children to wind up a fishing line on a reel

      • By themselves or in the presence of other children

      • They wound faster when in the presence of other children than when by themselves

        • One of the first social psychology experiments ever done

Simple vs. Difficult Tasks

  • When working on a more difficult task

    • Opposite results

      • A task can take longer to solve when others are present when performing alone

      • People and animals do worse in the presence of others when the task is difficult

Social Facilitation

Crowding: The Presence of Many Others

  • Effect of others’ presence increases with their number

  • Being in a crow intensifies positive or negative reactions

  • Three theories to explain increased arousal in groups:

    • Evaluation apprehension

      • Concern for how others are evaluating us

    • Driven by distraction

      • When we wonder how co-actors are doing or how an audience is reacting, we become distracted

    • Mere presence

      • Can be arousing even when we are not evaluated or distracted, they cause us to be alert or vigilant

Arousal and the Dominant Response (Zajonc, 1965)

  • The presence of others increases physiological arousal

    • i.e., our bodies become more energized

  • When such arousal exists:

    • It is easier to do something that is simple

    • It is har

Social Loafing

The tendency for people to exert less effort when they pool their effort toward a common goal than when they are individually accountable

  • Free riders- people who benefit from the group but give little in return

Social Loafing in Everyday Life

  • People in groups loaf less when the task is:

    • Challenging

    • Appealing

      • Rewards are significant

    • Involving

    • Team spirit

Culture and Social Loafing

  • Tendency to loaf stronger in Western cultures than in Asian cultures

  • Why?

    • Self-definitions:

      • Collectivistic cultures: interdependent self

        • Reduces social loafing tendencies

Deindividuation

The loosening of normal constraints on behavior when people cannot be differentiated (such as when they are in a crowd), leading to an increase in impulsive and deviant acts

  • Ex.

    • Mobs of soccer fans sometimes attacking each other

    • Hysterical fans at rock concerts who trampled each other to death

    • Lynching of African Americans by people cloaked in the anonymity of white robes