Group Influence and Aggression

Group Influence

• Group: Two or more people who interact and influence one another.
• Social Facilitation:
  • The presence of others can "liberate latent energy."
  • However, others' presence can diminish efficiency in learning nonsense syllables, completing mazes, and solving complex multiplication problems.
  • Occurs when people work toward individual goals and their efforts can be individually evaluated.

Why are we aroused in the presence of others?

1. Evaluation Apprehension: Concern about how others are evaluating us.
2. Driven by Distraction: Conflict between paying attention to others and the task at hand.
3. Mere Presence: The simple presence of others can be arousing.

Social Loafing

• The tendency for people to exert less effort when they pool their efforts toward a common goal than when they are individually accountable.
• Occurs when people work in groups but without individual accountability, unless the task is challenging, appealing, or involving.

Deindividuation

• Loss of self-awareness and evaluation apprehension.
• Occurs in group situations that foster responsiveness to group norms (good or bad).

Factors Contributing to Deindividuation:

• Group Size: A group has the power to arouse and render members unidentifiable.
• Arousing and Distracting Activities: There is a self-reinforcing pleasure in acting impulsively while seeing others do likewise.
• Anonymity: Contributes to a loss of self-awareness and concern for self-evaluation, enabling anti-normative or aggressive behavior.

Group Polarization

• Group-produced enhancement of members’ preexisting tendencies.
• A strengthening of the members’ average tendency, not a split within the group.
• Risky Shift Phenomenon: Initial studies by James Stoner (1961) found that group discussions led to riskier decisions.
• Group polarization experiments predict that discussion will strengthen an attitude shared by group members.
• Discussion increased polarization between homogeneous groups of high and low-prejudice high school students.

Group Polarization in Everyday Life:

• In School: Accentuation effect - Over time, initial differences among groups of students become accentuated.
• In Communities: People self-segregate, associating mostly with others whose attitudes are similar to their own.
• On the Internet: People share information from like-minded networks, reinforcing existing views.
• Terrorist Organizations: Arises among people with shared grievances, fanning the flames of extremism.

Explaining Group Polarization:

• Informational Influence: Group discussion elicits a pooling of ideas, most of which favor the dominant viewpoint.
• Normative Influence: We want to evaluate our opinions and abilities by comparing our views with others. We are most persuaded by people in our "reference groups"—groups we identify with.

Groupthink (Irving Janis)

• "The mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action."

Examples:

• Pearl Harbor
• The Bay of Pigs Invasion
• The Vietnam War

Antecedents:

• An amiable, cohesive group.
• Relative isolation of the group from dissenting viewpoints.
• A directive leader who signals what decision he or she favors.

Symptoms of Groupthink:

• Illusion of Invulnerability: The groups studied developed an excessive optimism that blinded them to warnings of danger.
• Unquestioned Belief in the Group’s Morality: Group members assume the inherent morality of their group and ignore ethical and moral issues.
• **Close-mindedness: **
  • Rationalization: The groups discount challenges by collectively justifying their decisions.
  • Stereotyped View of Opponent: Groupthinkers consider their enemies too evil to negotiate with or too weak and unintelligent to defend themselves against the planned initiative.
• **Pressures toward Conformity: **
  • Conformity Pressure: Group members rebuffed those who raised doubts about the group’s assumptions and plans, at times by personal sarcasm.
  • Self-Censorship: To avoid uncomfortable disagreements, members withheld or discounted their misgivings.
  • Illusion of Unanimity: Self-censorship and pressure not to puncture the consensus create an illusion of unanimity.
  • Mindguards: Some members protect the group from information that would call into question the effectiveness or morality of its decisions.

Critiquing Groupthink:

• Directive leadership is associated with poorer decisions because subordinates sometimes feel too weak or insecure about speaking up.
• Groups that make intelligent decisions have widely distributed conversations, with socially attuned members who take turns speaking.
• Groups with diverse perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts.

Preventing Groupthink:

1. Build a diverse team.
2. Intentionally structure discussions.
3. Engage with feedback.

Influence in Minority

• Consistency: More influential than a minority that wavers is a minority that sticks to its position.
• Self-Confidence: Consistency and persistence convey self-confidence.
• Defections from the Majority: A persistent minority punctures any illusion of unanimity.
• When a minority consistently doubts the majority's wisdom, majority members become freer to express their own doubts and may even switch to the minority position.

Is Leadership a Minority Influence?

• The process by which individuals mobilize and guide groups
• Task Leadership: Have a directive style - one that can work well if the leader is bright enough to give good orders
• Social Leadership: A democratic style-one that delegates authority, welcomes input from team members, and helps prevent groupthink.
• Transformational Leadership: Motivates others to identify with and commit themselves to the group's mission, inspires people to share their vision, and offers personal attention.

Prejudice: Disliking Others

• A preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual members
• Prejudice is an attitude - a combination of feelings, inclinations to act, and beliefs. It can be easily remembered as the ABCs of attitudes: affect, behavior tendency, and cognition.
• The negative evaluations that mark prejudice are often supported by negative beliefs, called stereotypes.
• Prejudice is a negative attitude; discrimination is negative behavior
• Racism and sexism are institutional practices that discriminate, even when there is no prejudicial intent.
• Prejudice illustrates our dual attitude system.
  • we can have different explicit and implicit attitudes toward the same target

Racial Prejudice

• Prejudice against or hostility toward people of another race or color
• Most people support racial equality and deplore discrimination
• Yet 3 in 4 people who take the Implicit Association Test display an automatic, unconscious White preference.
• Modern prejudice also appears subtly, in our preferences for what is familiar, similar, and comfortable.

Automatic Racial Prejudice

• Critics note that unconscious associations may only indicate cultural assumptions, perhaps without prejudice (which involves negative feelings and action tendencies).
• Or perhaps people's knee-jerk responses relate to familiarity, or to actual race differences.

What are the social sources of prejudice?

• Prejudice springs from several sources. It may arise from people differing in social status and their desires to justify and maintain those differences.
• Unequal status breeds prejudice.
• Masters view slaves as lazy, irresponsible, lacking ambition-as having exactly those traits that justify the slavery.
• They need to justify keeping things the way they are.

Conformity

• Prejudice is maintained largely by inertia. If prejudice is socially accepted, many people will follow the path of least resistance and conform to the fashion.

Institutional Prejudice

• Social institutions (schools, government, media, families) may bolster prejudice through overt policies such as segregation, or by passively reinforcing the status quo.
• Prejudice springs from unequal status and from other social sources, including our acquired values and attitudes.
• Socialization
• Authoritarian Personality: researchers uncovering the psychological roots of the poisonous right-wing anti-Semitism that caused the slaughter of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany.

What are the motivational sources of prejudice?

• Various kinds of motivations underlie the hostilities of prejudice. Motivations can also lead people to avoid prejudice.
• Pain and frustration (from the blocking of a goal) feed hostility.
• When the cause of our frustration is intimidating or unknown, we often redirect our hostility.
• This phenomenon of "displaced aggression" (scapegoating).
• Humans are a social species. Our ancestral history prepares us to feed and protect ourselves- to live-in groups.
• Those from our group, those who look like us, even those who sound like us-with accents like our own-we instantly tend to like.
• We categorize: We find it useful to put people, ourselves included, into categories.
• We identify. We associate ourselves with certain groups (our ingroups) and gain self-esteem by doing so.
• We compare: We contrast our groups with other groups (outgroups), with a favorable bias toward our own group.

Ingroup Bias

• The group definition of who you are-your gender, race, religion, marital status, academic major-implies a definition of who you are not.
• The circle that includes "us" (the ingroup) excludes "them" (the outgroup).
• The mere experience of being formed into groups may promote ingroup bias.
• Ingroup bias is one more example of the human quest for a positive self-concept.
• When our group has been successful, we can make ourselves feel better by identifying more strongly with it.
• We are so group conscious that, given any excuse to think of ourselves as a group, we will do so-and we will then exhibit ingroup bias.
• Status is relative: To perceive ourselves as having status, we need people below us.
• Thus, one psychological benefit of prejudice, or of any status system, is a feeling of superiority.
• Motivations not only lead people to be prejudiced but also to avoid prejudice.

Cognitive Sources

• Cognitive sources of prejudice refer to the mental processes that can lead to the and perpetuation of development prejudiced attitudes and beliefs.
• Humans naturally categorize and simplify the world around them. However, this can lead to the creation of stereotypes and generalizations about certain groups, which can result in prejudice.
• Illusory correlation People tend to overestimate the association between two events that are relatively rare, such as a negative behavior and a particular group. This can result in the belief that members of that group are more likely to engage in that behavior, even if it is not true.
• Just-World Belief People often have a deep-seated belief that the world is fair and just, and that individuals get what they deserve. This can result in the belief that members of certain groups are deserving of their disadvantaged status, or that they are inherently inferior.
• Attributional biases People tend to attribute the behavior of others to internal factors (such as personality traits) rather than external factors (such as situational circumstances).
• This can result in the belief that members of certain groups behave a certain way because of inherent traits, rather than due to external factors.
• Gender prejudice refers to negative attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes about individuals based on their gender. It can manifest in various forms, such as discrimination, bias, and stereotypes, and can be directed towards both men and women.
• Stereotypes about gender Society has constructed and perpetuated gender stereotypes that contribute to gender prejudice. These stereotypes can include beliefs about gender roles, behavior, and traits.
  • Hostile sexism This is the blatant and overt hostility towards women, including derogatory attitudes and beliefs. This can include beliefs that women are inferior, less intelligent, or less capable than men.
  • Benevolent sexism This is a more subtle form of sexism that involves attitudes and behaviors that appear positive towards women, but are actually patronizing and reinforce traditional gender roles.
  • Gender prejudice is often compounded by other forms of prejudice, such as racism, classism, and homophobia. It is important to recognize that individuals may face multiple forms of prejudice and discrimination simultaneously.
• Gender prejudice can have a range of negative consequences for both men and women, including lower self-esteem, decreased job opportunities, and reduced access to education and healthcare.

Consequences of Prejudice

• Attitudes may coincide with the social hierarchy not only as a rationalization for it but also because discrimination affects its victims.
• Stereotype Threat: a self-confirming apprehension that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype Three Ways Stereotype Threat Undermine Performance
  • Stress
  • Self-Monitoring
  • Suppressing unwanted thoughts and emotions
• Stereotypes bias Judgment, our stereotypes mostly reflect (though sometimes distort) reality
• people often evaluate individuals more • positively than the individuals' groups

Strong Stereotypes Matter

• color our judgments of individuals and affect our everyday lives.
• operate subtly
• evaluate people more extremely when their behavior violates our stereotypes
• Prejudice and stereotyping have important consequences
• stereotypes tend to perpetuate themselves and resist change

Reducing Prejudice

• If unequal status breeds prejudice, we can seek to create cooperative, equal-status relationships.
• If prejudice rationalizes discriminatory behavior, we can mandate nondiscrimination.
• If social institutions support prejudice, we can pull out those supports (for example, with media that model interracial harmony).
• If outgroups seem more homogeneous than they are, we can try to personalize their members.
• If our automatic prejudices lead us to feel guilt, we can use that guilt to motivate ourselves to break the prejudiced habit

Aggression: Hurting Others

• Aggression is physical or verbal behavior intended to cause harm.
  • Physical Aggression: hurting someone’s body
  • Social Aggression: Hurting someone else’s feelings or threatening their relationships. Sometimes called relational aggression, it includes cyberbullying and some forms of in-person bullying.
• Hostile Aggression: Aggression that springs from anger; its goal is to injure.
• Instrumental Aggression: Aggression that aims to injure, but only as a means to some other end.

Aggression as a Biological Phenomenon

• Freud: speculated that human aggression springs from a self- destructive impulse.
• Lorenz: saw aggression as adaptive rather than self- destructive
• Aggressive energy is instinctive (innate, unlearned, and universal).
• Instinctive Behavior: An innate, unlearned behavior pattern exhibited by all members of a species.
• Evolutionary psychologist believed that aggression was adaptive for our ancestors
  • gaining resources
  • defending against attack
  • intimidating or eliminating male rivals for males

Biology of Aggression

• Neural Influences: There are neural systems in both animals and humans that facilitate aggression.
• Genetic Influences: Heredity influences the neural system's sensitivity to aggressive cues.
  • (MAOA-L) -specific gene linked to aggression
• Biochemical Influences: Blood chemistry also influences neural sensitivity to aggressive stimulation.
  • Alcohol
  • Testosterone
  • Poor diet
• Biology and behavior interact

Aggression as a Response to Frustration

• The theory that frustration triggers a readiness to aggress
• Frustration is anything that blocks us from attaining a goal.
• Frustration grows when our motivation to achieve a goal is very strong, when we expected gratification, and when the blocking is complete.
• Most people learn to inhibit direct retaliation, especially when others might disapprove or punish; instead, we displace, or redirect, our hostilities to safer targets.
• The redirection of aggression to a target other than the source of the frustration. Generally, the new target is a safer or more socially acceptable target.

Berkowitz’s Revised Frustration - Aggression Theory

$Frustration \rightarrow Anger \rightarrow Aggression$

Relative Deprivation

• Frustration is not only caused by complete deprivation; more often, frustration arises from the gap between expectations and attainments.
• Happiness is lower and crime is higher in countries with large economic inequality
• Modern source of relative deprivation: affluence depicted on TV programs and commercials; social media depictions

Aggression as Learned Social Behavior

• We learn social behavior by observing and imitating, and by being rewarded and punished.
• Albert Bandura proposed a social learning theory of aggression.
• He believes that we learn aggression not only by experiencing its payoffs but also by observing others.

Influences on Aggression

• Aversive Incidents - Recipes for aggression often include some type of aversive experience. These include pain, uncomfortable heat, an attack, or overcrowding
• Arousal - Arousal from almost any source, even physical exercise or sexual stimulation, can be transformed into other emotions, such as anger.
• Aggression Cues - Aggression cues, such as the presence of a gun, increase the likelihood of aggressive behavior

Media Influence

• Social Media
• Radio
• Newspaper

Why does media affect behavior:

• It produces arousal
• Disinhibits
• Evoke Imitation

Media Violence

• Recipes for aggression often include some type of aversive experience. These include pain, uncomfortable heat, an attack, or overcrowding
• People often have a strong desire to not be aggressive, aggressive impulses are inhibited.
• We have mental scripts, schemas for how to respond in certain situations.

Group Influences

• Social