14 - Social Behaviour (The Influence of Groups) Flashcards
What is a group?
A collection of people with shared feature Orr attribute
What is group influence?
How the presence of others influences:
- Productivity
- Types of decisions made
- Attitudes and behaviours
What is social facilitation?
Improved perfomance in competition or even by merely being observed by others
What is social inhibition?
Can cause more errors or poorer performance (distracting)
What is social loafing?
Tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable
How can social loafing be reduced?
- Make individual contributions accountable
- Emphasise valuable individual contributions
- Appropriate group size
What is ‘risky shift’? Who did an experiment on this?
The tendency for groups to make riskier decisions than individuals would
Stoner - evaluated risk taking in groups, the group consensus is riskier than the average individual decision
What is ‘group polarisation’?
Group discussion strengthens the average inclination of group members (e.g. attitudes towards breastfeeding in public changed after group discussion)
How does ‘group polarisation’ produce this effect?
- Novel/persuasive arguments
- Social comparison and social desirability
- Discussion produces a commitment
Why do we help others?
- Cultural norms
- Social responsibility norm (give freely to those in need)
- Reciprocity norm (help those who help us)
What are ‘norms’?
Shared beliefs about appropriate conduct
- Explicit –> laws
- Implicit –> taken for granted habits
Behaviours that characterise group
Are norms easily changeable?
No - inherently resistant to change
What is conformity?
Constructing and adhering to norms. Yielding to the majority.
What was Solomon Asch’s experiment?
On conformity - experiment with lengths of lines
- Most participants gave wrong answer (answered 2nd to last) due to group pressure and after hearing other people (confederates) answer wrong
- In a control condition (where no participants were confederates), less than 1% were wrong
People will deliberately give incorrect answer to avoid social disapproval
Why conform?
Avoid censure, ridicule, social disapproval
- If allowed to write judgement privately, conformity dropped to 12.5%
