L8 - Group Productivity Flashcards
What is social facilitation? What study shows this?
- Tendency to perform better in the presence of others than when alone
- Ants/cockroaches dig faster when with others than separately
- Cyclists race faster when competing & children pulled a fishing line faster with others
- The more people that show up = better the performance
What is a study that proves and contradicts social facilitation?
- 5 ppts asked to generate arguments separately/groups
- Sep = less arguments = better quality
- Groups = more arguments = lower quality
What is social inhibition?
- Tendency to perform worse in the presence of others than when alone
How does social fac/inhibition come around?
- Presence of others
- Increase drive of arousal
- Arousal strengthens tendency to perform dominant/well-learnt response
- IF dom is correct = performance improved, if dom is wrong = performance impaired.
- Non-dominance is trying a new activity or not being good at something.
What was the study that showed social fac/inhib at the same time?
- Young women hung out at bars & covertly recorded good/bad billiard players
- Would then actively watch them play
- Good players = short accuracy increased and vice versa
What are the theories for social fac/inhib? Why are they all true?
- Mere Presence Theory: presence leads to arousal = enhances performance of well learned/simple tasks and causes declines in difficult tasks
- Evaluation Apprehension: Presence leads to assumptions that performacne is being evaluated = inc. arousal
- Distraction Conflict: Presence is distraction = attention divided = conflict/arousal (social animals who recognise people might need us/be a danger)
- All valid, just depends on context
What are the other explanations for social fac/inhib?
- Challenge vs threat
- Arousal is not specific: could be cortisol = threatening response = arousal
- Challenge is obstacles to overcome but you have resources to overcome = adrenaline = different form of arousal
- e.g public speaking = stressful, dom response built after a few times
What does overarousal lead to?
- Hormones increased e.g testosterone
- Skateboarders attempted harder tricks when attractive women were around
What are the different group tasks?
- Additive: Potential/maximum contribution is equal for everyone e.g tug of war
- Conjunctive: Can see who is collaborating to produce an outcome e.g chain is as strong as weakest link. Maximal identifiability = motivates better performance.
- Disjunctive: Part of group with different expertise with a problem to solve. No one person knows all, someone has best solution and know when to let someone have their authority/space
What is social loafing?
- Tendency to work less on a collective activity than when alone
- Brain can hide behinds others to perform less
- Rope pulling study: more people in an additive class, the less effort an individual puts in.
Why do we do social loafing?
- Valuing group success
- Identifying individuals contribution
- Importance of person's contribution
When is social loafing lower?
- People work with acquaintances than strangers
- Reward for group success is valued or task is challenging (is arousing)
What is social compensation?
- Occurs when people exert effort to compensate for others in the group
What was the study on social compensation?
- Paired with someone for a game: either they are bad/good at it.
- You know you might have to potentially compensate for it
- When told if it was for fun/serious, important & partner bad = performance improves. Every other situation we perform worse
What is the Kohler effect?
- Increased effort comes from the least competent person
- Social compensation involves increased effort from most competent
- Increases performance in teamed exercise
- e.g strong/weak lifting a bar = weak pulls harder to make less apparent as people can see you
