Chapter 12: Groups Flashcards
What is a group?
A collection of individuals who have relations to one another that make them interdependent to some significant degree
Norman Triplett (1898)
Aim: hypothesize that the presence of others tended to facilitate, or enhance, human performance (social facilitation)
Procedures: He invited 40 children to his laboratory and had them turn a
Social facilitation
Initially, a term for enhanced performance in the presence of others; now a broader term for the effect, positive or negative, of the presence of others on performance
How was Triplett’s findings extended?
- The same effects were obtained when the others were not doing the same thing but merely present as an audience of passive observers.
- The same effect was observed in a vast number of animal species
Zajonc’s Theory of Mere Presence
The presence of others, indeed the mere presence of others, tends to facilitate performance on simple or well-learned tasks but hinders performance on difficult or novel tasks.
Zajonc’s Theory of Mere Presence Components
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 inclined to do (dominant response).
The increase in dominant response tendencies facilitates performance on simple tasks and inhibits performance on complex tasks. Since on simple or well-learned tasks, the dominant response is the correct response leading to performance being facilitated by the presence of others. But on difficult or novel tasks, the dominant response is often incorrect response leading to performance being impaired by the presence of others.
Dominant response
In a person’s hierarchy of possible responses in any context, the response that person is most likely to make.
Zajonc, Heingartner & Herman 1969
Aim: Zajonc’s theory of mere presence
Procedures: Two conditions, a simple maze and a complex maze for the cockroaches to run when they are flashed with light. Then, the cockroaches ran one of these two mazes either alone or with another cockroach.
Findings: The presence of another cockroach facilitated performance on the simple maze but hindered performance on the complex maze.
Another study with cockroaches as a mere passive audience had the same effects.
What element has been disputed about Zajonc’s Theory of mere presence?
Whether it is in fact the mere presence of other people that increases arousal and not evaluation apprehension.
Evaluation apprehension
People’s concern about how they might appear or be evaluated in the eyes of others.
Cottrell et al 1968
Aim: evaluation apprehension responsible for social facilitation
Procedure: They gave the participants a list of ten nonsense words and had them pronounce two of the ten words once, two words twice, two words 5 times, two words 10
times, and two words 25 times. The more-practiced words, therefore, became the dominant response. Participants were then told that these same words would be flashed on a screen very briefly and that they were to identify each word as it was shown. If they couldn’t identify a
word, they should guess. None of the target words was actually shown, so participants were guessing on every trial. The participants performed this task either alone, in the presence of two other students watching attentively or in front of blindfolded observers.
Findings: Participants were more likely to exhibit dominant responses in the presence of an attentive audience compared to the two other conditions.
Implication: This experiment seems to demonstrate that its the concern about others as a source of evaluations, and their mere presence, that’s responsible for social facilitation.
What are the some doubts about Cottrell et al experiment?
The condition in which the participants were alone, they might have been physically alone, but they may not have been psychologically alone. Since they knew they were part of an experiment, they might have been worried they were being recorded
Markus (1978) study
Aim: To show that the mere presence of another person, in the absence of any concern about that person being evaluative, is indeed sufficient to create arousal according to Zajonc’s theory.
Procedure: Participants sat in an adjoining room to wait for the other participants to arrive. While there, they had to dress for the experiment, which req uired them to take off their shoes and put on a pair of lab socks over their socks, a pair of oversized lab shoes, and a lab coat. The participants did all this and waited, but in reality, no other participants were coming. They were then told that the experiment was over and were then instructed to change back into their clothes. The real experiment was observing could perform the novel tasks of putting on and taking off the unfamiliar
lab coat, socks, and shoes as well as how quickly they could perform the well-learned tasks of taking off and putting on their shoes. Participants did this in one of three conditions: alone, with another person watching attentively, or in the mere presence of a repairman working on a piece of apparatus with his back to the participant.
Findings: Participants took off and put on their shoes more quickly, and the experimenter’s socks,
shoes, and coat more slowly, when in the presence of another person–even when the other person had his back turned and was
unable to observe.
Social loafing
A phenomenon that counters social facilitation
The tendency to exert less effort when working on a group task in which individual contributions cannot be monitored
Groupthink
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.
What are symptoms of groupthink?
illusion of invulnerability
collective rationalization
belief in inherent morality of the group
stereotypes of outgroups
direct pressure on dissenters
self-censorship
illusion of unanimity
Self-censorship
The decision to withhold information or censorships in group discussions
How can you prevent groupthink?
Group leaders refrain from making their opinions or preferences known at the beginning for more vigorous discussions.
Have outside perspectives
Designate a devil’s advocate in the group
Group polarization
Group decisions tend to be more extreme than those made by individuals; whatever way the group as a whole is leaning, group discussion tends to make it lean further in that direction
What causes group polarization?
- Involves the persuasiveness of the information brought up during group discussion
- Involves people’s tendency to try to claim the “right” position among the various opinions with the group (social comparison)
Power
Refers to the ability to control one’s own outcomes and those of others
a person’s capacity to influence
Social hierarchy
An arrangement of individuals in terms of their rank, or power, relative to the power of other group members
What are the pathways to gaining power within groups?
There are two pathways virtue and vice.
How does virtue allow you to gain power within a group?
When individuals do things that are good for the group, group members, in their own self-interest, will recognize these contributions and give such individuals more power.
Ex. Courage, humanity, justice, and temperance
How do vices allow you to gain power within a group?
You are able to gain and keep power thanks to the actions that give you dominance over others.
Ex. Machiacvellianims, Narcissism, Psychopathy
Ten Brinke and Colleagues 2018
Aim: Testing virtue and vice hypotheses about gaining power
Procedure: Relying on archival videos of speeches by U.S. senators and interviews with hedge fund managers, they coded for verbal and nonverbal signs of virtues and vices.
Findings: The researchers found that
senators who showed evidence of virtue in their speeches were more often able to convince other senators to sign on to the bills they were promoting, whereas senators who showed more vice-based tendencies did not have such influence.
Hedge fund managers who showed more evidence of virtues and less evidence of vices in their interviews earned greater economic returns for their clients.
Implications: Perhaps it does pay to be good after all.
Approach/inhibition theory of power
A theory maintaining that high-power individuals are inclined to go after their goals and make quick (sometimes rash) judgments, whereas low-power individuals are more likely to constrain their behavior and pay careful attention to others.
Galinsky (2006)
Aim: Those with elevated power are less careful in their judgments of others, they often fail to respond empathically to others.
Procedures: These investigators first induced people to feel relatively
powerful or powerless by having them recall a time when they exerted control over another person or when someone else exerted control over them. Participants then performed a simple perspective-taking task: drawing the letter E on their forehead so that someone sitting across from them could read it.
Findings: Participants feeling a surge of power were much less likely to draw the E in a way that took the other person’s perspective into account.
How does power affect thoughts and actions?
People with a lot of power can lead to empathy deficits.
People with a lot of power become overconfident, they overestimate the accuracy of their knowledge.
Feeling less powerful makes people less flexible in their thinking.
Elevated power is associated with increased unethical and immoral behavior.
Power corrupts the corruptible.
Deindividuation
A reduced sense of individual identity accompanied by diminished self-regulation that can come over people when they are in a large group
Zimbardo’s model of deindividuation
The conditions that lead to deindividuation are
anonymity individuals enjoy by blending in with a large group,
the diffusion of responsibility that occurs when there are many people to share the blame,
the arousal, heightened activity, and sensory overload that often accompany being immersed in a large group.
This leads to behavior effects like impulsivity, irrationality, emotionality, and antisocial activity.
Watson 1973
Aim: If a relationship exists between deindividuation and brutality of warfare.
Procedures: Researchers investigated the warfare practices of 23 non-Western cultures. They examined each culture to see whether its warriors were deindividuated before battle and how aggressively they waged war.
Findings: As predicted, there was a strong correlation between deindividuation and aggressiveness in warfare. Among those cultures whose warriors changed their appearance before battle, 80 percent were deemed particularly aggressive; among those cultures whose warriors did not change their appearance, only 13 percent were deemed especially aggressive.
Diener et al 1976
Aim: The role of deindividuation in antisocial behavior
Procedures: They set up research stations in 27 homes and monitored the behavior of more than 1,000 trick-or-treaters. At each participating house, an assistant of the experimenter told the children they could take one piece of candy from a large bowl sitting on a table at the entrance to the house. Next to the bowl of candy was a bowl filled with coins. The assistant then walked away and covertly monitored the
children’s actions from afar. The children arrived either individually or in groups, and the investigators expected those in groups to feel more anonymous and, therefore, to be more likely to transgress. Second, the assistants purposely “individuated” a random sample of children arriving both alone and in groups.
Before departing, they asked these children for their names and addresses and then repeated this information aloud for emphasis.
Findings: The children who arrived in groups were much more likely to
transgress than those who were alone, regardless of whether they were anonymous or not. Children who were anonymous were much more likely to transgress than those who were individuated, regardless of whether they were alone or in groups.
Implication: The anonymous children trick-or-treating in groups were the most likely to transgress.
Individuation
An enhanced sense of individual identity produced by focusing attention on the self, which generally leads people to act carefully, deliberately, and in accordance with their sense of propriety and values.
Self-awareness theory
When people focus their attention on themselves, they become more concerned with self-evaluation and how their current behavior conforms to their own standards and values.
Diener & Wallbom 1976 Study
Aim: self-awareness
In one study, researchers asked college students to solve a series of anagrams and told them to stop when a bell sounded. In a control condition, nearly three-quarters of them fudged a bit by continuing to work beyond the bell. But in a condition in which participants were made self-aware by working in front of a mirror, fewer than 10 percent cheated.
Bateson, Nettle & Roberts, 2006 Study
Aim: Self-awareness promotes behavior that is more in keeping with personal standards.
Procedure: The provision of milk for coffee ran according to such an honor system, and people contributed whatever they wanted for it. When Bateson and colleagues placed an image of flowers on a wall near the coffee dispenser, her work colleagues gave, on average, 15 pence for every liter of milk. But when an image of a person’s eyes stared at them as they contributed, prompting greater self-awareness, their donations jumped considerably, rising to 70 pence when the image was of a stern-looking man’s eyes.
Implications: Self-awareness prompted more socially appropriate behavior.
Spotlight effect
People’s conviction that other people are paying attention to their appearance and behavior more than is actually the case.
Prisoner’s dilemma
A situation involving payoffs to two people who must decide whether to cooperate or defect. In the end, trust and cooperation lead to higher joint payoffs than mistrust and defection do.
What are some situational determinants of cooperation?
As the likelihood of interacting with someone in the future rises, we become more cooperative.
When we see cues in a person that signal that an individual is likely to cooperate; once we detect those cues, they trigger cooperation on our part in turn.
A person’s reputation impacts the likelihood someone will cooperate.
Reputation
The collective beliefs, evaluations, and impressions about an individual’s character develop within a group or social network.
How does the way we construal events effect cooperation?
The way we label situations can influence levels of competition and cooperation
Liberman, Samuels and Ross 2002 Study
Aim: the power of labels
Procedure: They labeled the prisoner’s game in one of two ways. Half the participants were told they were going to play the “Wall Street” game and the other half were told it was the “community” game. Everything else about the experiment was the same for the two groups.
Findings: Those playing the community game cooperated in the opening round twice as often as those playing the Wall Street game did. The label had an impact: the Wall Street label made participants adopt a perspective of maximizing their own profits. The community label increased the appeal of maximizing the participants’ joint outcomes.
Henrich et al 2001 Study
Aim: The type of effect cultural factors have on the inclination to either cooperate or defect
Procedures: They conducted a cross-cultural version of the ultimatum game, recruiting participants who were foragers, slash-and-burn farmers, nomadic herders, and individuals in settled agriculturalist societies in Africa, South America, and Indonesia. The good that the participants were allowed to offer an anonymous stranger differed. In some cultures, it was money; in others, it was a cherished item such as tobacco.
Findings: Allocators offered, on average, 39 percent of the good to anonymous strangers.
Implications: The more the members of a culture relied on each other to gather food and meet other needs, the more they offered to a stranger when they were allocators in the ultimatum game.
Interdependence fosters cooperation.
Tit-for-tat strategy
A strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma game in which the player’s first more is cooperative, thereafter, the player mimics the other person’s behavior, whether cooperative or competitive. This strategy fares well when used against other strategies.
Why does the tit-for-tat strategy work so well?
- It’s cooperative and thus encourages mutually supportive action toward a shared goal
- It’s not envious; a partner using this strategy can do extremely well without resorting to competitive behavior
- It’s not exploitable, meaning it’s not easily taken advantage of
- It’s forgiving; that is, it’s willing to cooperate at the first cooperative action of the partner, even after long runs of defection and competition
- It’s easy to read.
