Psychological Significance of Groups

• Even though people are capable of living separate and apart from others, they join with others because groups meet their psychological and social needs

The Need to Belong

• A pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and impactful interpersonal relationships

• Most of us satisfy this need by joining groups

• People respond negatively when their need to belong is unfulfilled

• People who are accepted members of a group tend to feel happier and more satisfied but should they be rejected by a group, they feel unhappy, helpless, and depressed

• Ostracism

  • Deliberate exclusion from groups

  • Indicate this experience is highly stressful and can lead to depression, confused thinking, and even aggression

Affiliation in Groups

• Social Comparison

  • Suggested that in many cases people join with others to evaluate the accuracy of their personal beliefs and attitudes

  • Stanley Schachter

    • Putting individuals in ambiguous, stressful situations and asking then if they wished to wait along or with others

    • Found that people affiliate in such situations – they seek the company of others

• Although any kind of companionship is appreciated, we prefer those who provide us with reassurance and support as well as accurate information

• In some cases, we also prefer to join with others who are even worse off than we are

• Downward Social Comparison

  • To maintain a sense of self-worth, people seek out and compare themselves to the less fortunate

Identity and Membership

• Common sense tells us that our sense of self is our private definition of who we are, a kind of archival record of our experiences, qualities, and capabilities. Yet the self also includes all those qualities that spring from memberships in groups.

• People are defined not only by their traits, preferences, interests, likes, and dislikes, but also by their friendships, social roles, family connections, and group memberships

  • Self is not just a “me” but also a “we”

• Social Identity Theory

  • Assumes that we don’t just classify other people into such social categories as man, woman, Anglo, elderly, or college student, but we also categorize ourselves

  • We strongly identify with these categories, then we will ascribe the characteristics of the typical member of these groups to ourselves, and so stereotype ourselves

• Collective Self-Esteem

  • If our self-esteem is shaken by a personal setback, we can focus on our group’s success and prestige

  • By comparing our group to other groups, we frequently discover that we are members of the better group, and so can take pride in our superiority

  • By denigrating other groups, we elevate both our personal and our collective self-esteem

• Sociometer Model

  • Self-esteem is part of a sociometer that monitors people’s relational value in other people’s eyes

  • Maintains self-esteem is not just an index of one’s sense of personal value, but also an indicator of acceptance into groups

  • Self-esteem is not just high self-regard, but self-approbation that we feel when included in groups

Evolutionary Advantages of Group Living

• Theory of Social Integration

  • Moreland concludes that groups tend to form whenever “people become dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs”

• Advantages of group life may be so great that humans are biologically prepared to seek membership and avoid isolation

• From evolutionary psychology perspective:

  • Because groups have increased human’s overall fitness for countless generations, individuals who carried genes that promoted solitude-seeking were less likely to survive and procreate compared to those with genes that prompted them to join groups

  • This process of natural selection culminated in the creation of a modern human who seeks out membership in groups instinctively, for most of us descendants of “joiners” rather than “loners”

Social Facilitation in Groups

• Social Facilitation

  • The enhancement of an individual’s performance when that person works in the presence of other people

  • Depends on the task: other people facilitate performance when the task is so simple that it requires only dominant responses, but others interfere when the task requires nondominant responses

• Evaluation Apprehension

  • When we feel that our individual performance will be known to others, and those others might judge it negatively

• Presence of other people can also cause perturbations in our capacity to concentrate on and process information

• Distractions due to the presence of other people have been shown to improve performance on certain tasks but undermine performance on more cognitively demanding tasks

Social Loafing

• When people work together they must coordinate their individual activities and contributions to reach the maximum level of efficacy – but they rarely do

  • Coordination Loss: the 3-person group is stronger than a single person, but not 3 times as strong

• Social Loafing

  • People don’t just exert as much effort when working on a collective endeavor, nor do they expend as much cognitive effort by trying to solve problems, as they do when working along

Teamwork

• One way to overcome social loafing is by recognizing that each group member has an important part to play in the success of the group

• Teamwork

  • Group may include many talented individuals but they must learn how to pool their individual abilities and energies to maximize the team’s performance

  • Team goals must be set, work patterns structured, and a sense of group identity developed

  • Individual members must learn how to coordinate their actions, and any strains and stresses in interpersonal relations needs to be identified and resolved

• 2 key ingredients to effective teamwork:

  • A shared mental representation of the task and group unity

• Teams improve their performance over time as they develop a shared understanding of the team and the tasks they are attempting

• Group Cohesion

  • The integrity, solidarity, social integration, or unity of a group

  • Members tend to enjoy their groups more when they are cohesive, and cohesive groups usually outperform ones that lack cohesions

  • Cohesive groups also can be spectacularly unproductive if the group’s norms stress low productivity rather than high productivity

Group Development

• Groups usually pass through several stages of development as they change from a newly formed group into an effective team

Focus Topic 1: Group Development Stages and Characteristics

• Stage 1: Forming Stage

  • Members become oriented toward one another

• Stage 2: Storming Stage

  • Group members find themselves in conflict, and some solution is sought to improve the group environment

• Stage 3: Norming Stage

  • Standards for behavior and roles develop that regulate behavior

• Stage 4: Performing Stage

  • Group has reached a point where it can work as a unit to achieve desired goals

• Stage 5: Adjourning Stage

  • Ends the sequence of development; the group disbands

• Groups tend to oscillate between the task-oriented issues and the relationship issues, with members sometimes working hard but at other times strengthening their interpersonal bonds

• During the investigation stage, you are still an outsider: interested in joining the group, but not yet committed to it in any way. But once the group accepts you, and you accept the group, socialization begins: you learn the group’s norms and take on different responsibilities depending on your role

• When commitment wanes, however, your membership may come to an end as well.

Making Decisions in Groups

• Groups not only generate more ideas and possible solutions by discussing the problem, but they can also more objectively evaluate the options that they generate during discussion.

• Before accepting a solution, a group may require that a certain number of people favor it, or that it meets some other standard of acceptability

• People generally feel that a group’s decision will be superior to an individual’s decision

• Groups do not always make good decisions

Group Polarization

• Judgments made after group discussion will be more extreme in the same direction as the average of individual judgments made prior to discussion

• If a majority of members feel that taking risks is more acceptable than exercising caution, then the group will become riskier after a discussion

Common Knowledge Effect

• One of the advantages of making decisions in groups is the group’s greater access to information

• When seeking a solution to a problem, group members can put their ideas on the table and share their knowledge and judgments with each other through discussions. But all too often groups spend much of their discussion time examining common knowledge – information that 2 or more group members know in common – rather than unshared information

• Common Knowledge Effect: will result in a bad outcome if something known by only 1 or 2 group members is very important

Groupthink

• A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action

• 4 Group-Level Factors:

  • Cohesion

    • Groupthink only occurs in cohesive groups

    • Extreme cohesiveness can be dangerous

    • When cohesiveness intensifies, members become more likely to accept the goals, decisions, and norms of the group without reservation

    • Conformity pressures also rise as members become reluctant to say or do anything that goes against the grain of the group, and the number of internal disagreements – necessary for good decision-making – decreases

  • Isolation

    • Groupthink groups too often work behind closed doors, keeping out of the limelight

    • They isolate themselves from outsiders and refuse to modify their beliefs to bring them into line with society’s beliefs

    • They avoid leaks by maintaining strict confidentiality and working only with people who are members of their group

  • Biased Leadership

    • A biased leader who exerts too much authority over group members can increase conformity pressures and railroad decisions

    • In groupthink groups, the leader determines the agenda for each meeting, sets limits on discussion, and can even decide who will be heard

  • Decisional Stress

    • Groupthink becomes more likely when the group is stressed, particularly by time pressures

    • When groups are stressed they minimize their discomfort by quickly choosing a plan of action with little argument or dissension. Then, through collective decision, the group members can rationalize their choice by exaggerating the positive consequences, minimizing the possibility of negative outcomes, concentrating on minor details, and overlooking larger issues

You and Your Groups

• To avoid polarization, the common knowledge effect, and groupthink, groups should strive to emphasize open inquiry of all sides of the issue while admitting the possibility of failure