Chapter 12: Social Psychology — Group Membership and Social Influence (Vocabulary)
Learning Objectives
- Describe the advantages and disadvantages of groups.
- Explain factors that determine ingroup and outgroup formation.
- Define social facilitation, deindividuation, group polarization, groupthink, and social loafing.
- Differentiate between conformity, compliance, and obedience.
Brain Size and the Social Brain
- The social brain hypothesis places challenges of group living in the context of brain size, emphasizing the role of large prefrontal cortexes in dynamic and complex social groups that change over time.
- Over evolutionary history, being kicked out of a group had dire consequences, so humans are motivated to maintain good relations with group members.
- A good group member must:
- Understand complex and subtle social rules,
- Recognize when actions might offend others,
- Control desires to engage in behaviors that might violate group norms.
- Brain size data (conceptual takeaway): primates have relatively large brains and neuron counts, especially among humans and other higher primates, which supports the social brain hypothesis.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Membership
- Benefits of group membership include security from predators and assistance in hunting and gathering.
- Throughout evolution, it was critical to identify others as friends (suppliers) or foes (competitors) and to react accordingly (cooperate or compete).
- Humans automatically and pervasively form groups, which offers social support but also creates pressures to conform and compete with other groups.
- Two critical conditions for group formation:
- Reciprocity: if A helps or harms B, B will likely help or harm A (mutual back-scratching).
- Transitivity: people tend to share opinions about others based on their friends’ opinions; if A likes C and dislikes D, B (A’s friend) will tend to like C and dislike D as well.
Outgroup Homogeneity Effect
- Tendency to view outgroup members as more similar to one another than ingroup members are to one another.
- Example: university students from one school may view another school’s students as uniform, while recognizing diversity within their own group.
- Source example provided in the transcript: https://study.com/academy/lesson/outgroup-homogeneity-definition-effects-quiz.html
Social Identity Theory
- Ingroups consist of individuals who see themselves as members of the same social category and experience pride through group membership.
- Ingroup favoritism: tendency to evaluate and privilege ingroup members more favorably than outgroup members.
- Minimal group paradigm: even arbitrary and trivial group distinctions can produce ingroup favoritism.
Groups Influence Individual Behavior
- People seek to present themselves positively to fit in with the group.
- Most people are easily influenced by others, conform to group norms, and obey authorities.
Social Facilitation
- Presence of others generally enhances performance (social facilitation).
- Zajonc’s model: presence of others increases arousal, which amplifies the dominant response.
- If the dominant response is easy, performance is enhanced; if it is difficult, performance is impaired.
- Formal representation (conceptual):
- When the required response is easy or well learned, the dominant response is good performance.
- When the required response is difficult or not well learned, the dominant response is poor performance.
- Core idea: arousal from others boosts the tendency to perform the usual or dominant response.
Deindividuation
- Classic Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo & Haney): male undergraduates assigned to guard or prisoner roles in a mock prison.
- Within days, guards exhibited brutal and sadistic behavior; prisoners became helpless to resist.
- Deindividuation: a state of reduced individuality, self-awareness, and restraint that can occur in group contexts, especially when aroused and anonymous and when responsibility is diffused.
- Self-awareness normally aligns behavior with personal values; loss of self-awareness reduces restraints.
Group Decision Making
- Risky-shift effect: groups tend to make riskier decisions than individuals.
- Initial attitudes of group members influence whether the group becomes riskier or more cautious.
Group Polarization
- Process whereby group discussions lead to more extreme positions than those initially held by individual members.
- Example: juries tend to adopt stronger beliefs about guilt or innocence after discussion.
Groupthink
- Tendency of a group to make a bad decision to preserve group cohesion, especially under pressure, external threats, or directional bias.
- Characteristics:
- The group does not carefully process all information,
- Dissent is discouraged,
- Members reassure each other they are doing the right thing.
- This is an extreme form of group polarization with poor information processing.
Preventing Groupthink
- Leaders should refrain from expressing their opinions too strongly at the start of discussions.
- Encourage alternative ideas (devil's advocate, outside opinions).
- Systematically weigh pros and cons and examine multiple alternatives.
Social Loafing
- Tendency for people to exert less effort in a group than when working alone.
- Classic demonstration: six blindfolded people shouting with headphones vs. shouting alone; individuals shouted less when they believed others were shouting with them.
- Mitigation: when individual effort can be monitored, social loafing decreases.
- Conformity: altering behavior and opinions to match those of others or group expectations.
- Normative influence: conform to fit in with the group.
- Informational influence: conform because others’ behavior is perceived as correct.
- Social norms: expected standards of conduct that influence behavior.
- Research shows people typically conform to social norms (general trend across contexts).
- Sherif (1930s): demonstrated power of conformity in social judgment.
- Asch experiments: classic demonstrations of conformity to incorrect group judgments.
- Link to videos and further readings in the transcript: https://youtu.be/p4WSiIMfr-Q?si=zTUSVyLB8o7-96bQ
- Conformity is robust, but certain conditions reduce it:
- Group size (larger groups increase pressure, up to a point).
- Lack of unanimity (dissent from a single nonconforming member reduces conformity).
- Follow-up studies by Asch and others identified factors that decrease conformity.
- Groups enforce conformity; those who resist may be rejected.
Obedience to Authority
- Obedience: following orders from an authority figure.
- Milgram’s experiments showed that ordinary people may perform harmful actions when ordered by authority.
- Obedience tends to decrease with greater psychological or physical distance from the authority.
- Contemporary replication suggested around 70% of participants complied to the maximum voltage in some variants.
- Original Milgram predictions suggested fewer than 0.1% would obey completely, yet actual obedience at the maximum shock level was about 65\% in the cited study.
- Ethical critiques of Milgram’s experiments focus on treatment of participants, deception, and potential harm; despite criticisms, the studies illustrate the strength of situational influences on obedience.
- Experimental data (summary):
- Intensity levels used in the Milgram paradigm ranged in volts from 75 to 450\text{ volts} (as shown in the figure).
- The predicted obedience rate was <0.1\%, while the actual observed obedience at the highest level was 65\% in the cited replication data.
- Notes on replication and ethics: subsequent work raised concerns about participant treatment and the extent to which participants believed the shocks were real; some critiques focus on the degree of authority encouragement versus coercive pressure and participants’ beliefs about the scientific purpose.
Real-World Relevance and Implications
- Understanding group dynamics helps explain behavior in organizations, political groups, juries, and online communities.
- Ethical implications include balancing research insights with the protection of participants and minimizing harm.
- Practical applications include designing groups to minimize groupthink, encourage constructive dissent, and manage conformity pressures in workplaces and classrooms.
