8. Group Processes Flashcards
What is a group?
- Collection of 3 or more people who interact with each other and are interdependent
- Their needs and goals cause them to rely on one another - they work towards a common goal
Why do people join groups?
- Evolutionary perspective: forming relationships with others fulfills a number of basic human needs; innate
- Humanistic perspective: groups help us define who we are as individuals
- Collective identity: group membership motivates us to become involved in social change
Name 4 elements that determine the composition and function of groups
- Social norms
- Social roles
- Group cohesiveness
- Group diversity
What are social norms?
- Implicit/explicit rules that specify acceptable behaviors, values and beliefs for members of a group
- Expectations for all members of the group
What are social roles?
- Shared expectations by group members about how particular people in the group are supposed to behave
- Getting too caught up in roles can result in loss of identity and personality change
- Ex: Zimbardo’s experiment
What is group cohesiveness?
- Qualities of a group that bind members together and promote liking among them - shared identities encourage us to bond with one anotehr
- Cohesiveness influences the extent to which members are likely to stay in the group, take part in group activities, and recruit like-minded members
- A group that is too cohesive lose aspects of objective thinking and decision making
What is group diversity?
- Groups that are non-homogeneous, comprised of members who are not alike in age, sex, beliefs, and opinions
- The more diverse groups tend to make better decisions
Explain social facilitation
- When in the presence of others and their individual performance can be evaluated, tendency for people to do better on simple tasks but worse on complex tasks
- Level of difficulty of task based on confidence
3 theories explaining the role of arousal:
- The presence of other people cause us to become alert and vigilant
- Evaluation apprehension: others make us apprehensive about being evaluated
- Others distract us from the task
- Co-actor effect: when there are other performing the task with us (cooperation vs competition effect)
- Audience effect: when there are others actively observing us
Explain social loafing
- When in the presence of others and their individual performance can’t be evaluated, the tendency for people to do worse on simple tasks, but better on complex tasks
- When our performance in a group cannot be identified, we become more relaxed
Tendency to loaf is stronger in:
- Men than in women
- Individualist cultures than in collectivist cultures
What is process loss?
- Any aspect of group interaction that inhibits good problem solving
- Common occurence: tendency to focus mainly on what its members already know in common –> failure to share unique information that each person might have
What is groupthink?
- Process loss
- A kind of thinking in which maintaining group cohesiveness and solidarity is more important than considering the facts in a realistic manner
- Causes people to reach an inferior decision, sometimes with disastrous consequences
What are the antecedants and symptoms of groupthink, and symptoms of defective decision making?
Antecedants of groupthink:
- The group is highly cohesive: the group is valued and attractive, and people very much want to be members
- Group isolation: the group is isolated, protected from hearing alternative viewpoints
- A directive leader: the leader controls the discussion and makes his or her wishes known
- High stress: Members perceive stress to the group
- Poor decision-making procedures: no standards methods to consider alternative viewpoints
Symptoms of groupthink
- Illusion of invulnerability: the group feels invincible and can do no wrong
- Belief in the moral correctness of the group: “God is on our side”
- Stereotyped views of out-group: opposing sides are viewed in a simplistic, stereotyped manner
- Self-censorship: people decide themselves not to voice contrary opinions so as not to “rock the boat”
- Direct pressure on dissenters to conform: if people do voice contrary opinions, they are pressured by others to conform to the majority
- Illusion of unanimity: an illusion is created that everyone agrees (by not calling on people known to disagree)
- Mindguards: group members protect the leader from contrary viewpoints
Defective decision making:
- Incomplete survey of alternatives
- Failure to examine risks of the favoured alternative
- Poor information search
- Failure to develop contingency plans
How to overcome groupthink?
- Impartial leadership (ex: democracies, change leadership from time to time)
- Sub-groups
- Anonymous opinions
- Outside opinions - diverse source of information, different information
Explain deindividuation
- The loosening of normal constraints ob behavior when people are in a group, leading to an increase in impulsive and deviant acts
- Being in a group and wearing a uniform or disguise increases anonymity, thus making people feel less accountable for their actions - related to social loafing
- The presence of others lowers self awareness, thereby shifting people’s attention away from their moral standards
- Deindividuation increases the extent to which people obey the group norms, whther they are for the good or the bad
- Zimbardo prison experiment
What is group polarization?
- The tendency for groups to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclinations of their members
- Believed to occur because people become exposed to even more persuasive arguments than they had at the onset - quantity vs quality of arguments
- Social comparison forces might also be at play, with people adopting similar but more extreme views on order to be liked by the group
What is the great person theory?
- Says that certain key personality traits make a person a good leader, regardless of the situation the leader faces
- Research shows a weak relationship between internal traits and leadership
- Integrative complexity: the ability to recognize and integrate various perspectives - understanding social context and putting things together; shows a stronger link with leadership effectiveness
What are the 2 leadership styles?
- Transactional leaders: set clear, short-term goals and reward people who meet them
- Transformational leaders: inpire followers to focus on common, long-term goals (more effective)
What is the contingency theory of leadership?
- Theory that leadership depends both on how task-oriented or relationship-oriented the leader is, and on the amount of control and influence the leader has over the group
- Task-oriented leader: concerned more with getting the job done - best when have low or high situational control
- Relationship-oriented leader: concerned primarily with the feelings of and relationships between the workers, team building - best when have moderate situational control
- Idea that leadership comes down to how we understand a specific context - the social situation predicts which is going to be more effective over the other (task-oriented or relationship-oriented)
Explain gender and leadership
- Women who act in accordance with social norms by being more communal may be seen as having less leadership potential than those who act more agentic
- By the same token, women who are agentic in their leadership styles are derogated for defying social norms
- Women who use a more transformational leadership style may still be evaluated negatively by male subordinates
What is a social dilemma?
Conflict in which the most beneficial action for an individual will, if chosen by most people, have harmful effects on everyone
What is a prisoner’s dilemma?
- A game in which two players must each choose one of two options, pitting individual gain against group gain
- The outcome for each player depends on their combined choices
- The best outcome for both players is to choose a cooperative strategy, even though the competitive strategy seems more appealing
How to increase cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma?
More cooperation if:
- playing against a friend
- expecting to interact with their partner in the future
- playing in small groups rather than large
What’s the Tit-For-Tat strategy?
A means of encouraging cooperation by first acting cooperatively, and then responding the way your opponent did on the previous turn
How to increase cooperation in social dilemmas?
- Create a social norm of cooperating by repeatedly doing so. Eventually, every group member begins to cooperate, and all benefit in the end
Explain threats and conflict
- When caught in a conflict, many of us are tempted to use threats to get the other party to comply
- Research suggests that threats are not an effective means of reducing conflict
- Found that communication helps to resolve conflict if it’s used to work out a solution for both parties
- If communication is used mainly to convey threats, competition is increased
What is negotiation?
- Form of communication between opposing sides in a conflict in which offers and counter-offers are made
- A solution occurs only when both parties agree
What is an integrative solution?
- A solution to a conflict whereby the parties make trade-offs on issues according to their different interests
- Each side concedes the most on issues that are unimportant to it but important to the other side
- Mediators can play a key role in helping each side recognize that there are mutually agreeable solutions to a conflict
