Chapter 12 Groups Flashcards
How do you define a group?
A group is a collection of individuals who are interdependent to some significant degree.
Groups provide care for offspring, protection from predators, and access to food, which helps ensure the reproduction of our genes.
What is the term that was initially used to describe enhanced performance in the presence of others and is now a broad term for both the positive and negative effects of the presence of others?
Social facilitation
It happens in animal species as well
What are three components of Zajonc’s theory of mere presence?
- the mere presence of others makes us more aroused.
- arousal tends to make us more rigid and narrowly focused, in that we become more inclined to do what we’re already automatically inclined to do
dominant response: the responses that one person is most likely to make in a person’s hierarchy of possible responses in any context
- the increase in dominant response tendencies facilitates performance on simple tasks and inhibits performance on complex tasks.
What is a concern about looking bad in the eyes of others called?
Evaluation apprehension
Participants performing in front of an evaluative audience made more dominant responses than those performing alone did, but those performing in front of a blindfolded audience did not.
What is the tendency to exert less effort when working on a group task where individual contributions cannot be monitored?
Social loafing
How do we define groupthink?
Groupthink is a kind of faulty thinking by highly cohesive groups in which the critical scrutiny that should be devoted to the issues at hand is subverted by social pressures to reach consensus.
A high-stress situation with high stakes for making the correct decision is one of the antecedent conditions to groupthink.
What do strong leaders and the drive to find consensus breed?
Self-censorship: the decision to withhold information or opinions
What are some ways to prevent groupthink?
- Group leaders can refrain from making their opinions known at the beginning
- New members can provide a fresh perspective
- A devil’s advocate - tasking one person with bringing to the group’s attention any weaknesses in the group’s deliberations and plans
- More empathic individuals, take turns in expressing ideas
- More women in the group
What does group polarization do to contribute to social divisions?
group decisions tend to be more extreme than those made by individuals.
Whatever way the majority of individuals in a group are leaning, group discussion tends to make them lean even further in that direction
What are the two reasons behind group discussions leading to more extreme answers?
- the persuasiveness of the information brought up during group discussion
- people’s tendency to try to claim the “right” position among the various opinions within the group
- social comparison interpretation: the desire to distinguish oneself from others by expressing a more extreme opinion in the “right” direction leads predictably to the group polarization effect.
What does power refer to in an individual context?
A person’s capacity to control one’s own outcomes and those of others
How do we define social hierarchy?
an arrangement of individuals in terms of their rank, or power, relative to the power of other group members
- provides rules for dividing up resources
- provide a shared notion of how decisions are made
What are two pathways for gaining power within groups?
- the path of virtue – doing things that are good for the group, e.g., sharing knowledge or giving time to others
courage, humanity, justice, and temperance are four virtues that enable an individual to gain power within groups - vice – machiavellianism (manipulativeness, deception, dominance), narcissism, psychopathy (lack of empathy, impulsivity, aggressiveness)
we gain and keep power thanks to actions that give us dominance over others, such as through force, fraud, manipulation, strategic violence, and the weakening of people around us
first one is better overall
Which theory offers explanation to why having power can lead to its abuse?
The approach/inhibition theory:
when people experience elevated power, they should show approach behavior—that is, they tend to be less concerned about the evaluations of others and more inclined to act in goal-driven ways
less powerful people should show inhibition behavior—that is, they tend to be more vigilant and careful in making judgments and decisions and more restrained when taking action.
What are some facts about high-power individuals? (empathy failures/disinhibition)
- more likely to stereotype others than carefully attend to individuating information about them
- less accurate judges of others’ emotions
- more sexually inappropriate behavior
- more likely to interrupt and swear at others
- more likely to disobey the traffic law
The effects of power depend on who holds it. Power corrupts the corruptible.
