Lecture 5 - Groups Flashcards
- Define groups and group cohesiveness.
What is a group?
- A set of individuals who share the following characteristics (Kassin, Fein & Marcus, 2011):
Direct interactions with each other over a period of time;
Joint membership in a social category based on sex, race or other attributes
A shared fate, identity or set of goals.
Why do people join groups?
- Protection against threat and uncertainty?
- Gain a greater sense of social identity
- OR: is this just what humans do?
- There may be some benefit for us individuals if we join groups
Group Cohesiveness
“The extent to which forces push group members closer together.” (Kassin, Fein & Marcus, 2011, p.299)
Cohesiveness and performance
- Better performance = improved cohesiveness…
- …for smaller groups (Mullen & Copper, 1994)
- Female sports teams (Carron et al., 2002) a study that looked at different features of particular groups – found that the more cohesiveness there is in a group the more that group is better to perform.
How well a group works well towards a common goal to achieve something.
You don’t have to like the people in your group to work well with them.
Classic study into groups:
The Presence of Others
Classic study: Triplett (1898)
- Hypothesis: Competitive instinct “released” in presence of another, increasing nervous energy and enhancing performance
- Study: Fishing reels
- 40 children winding fishing reels
- Alone vs. In competition with another
- Results: Faster when in competition than when alone.
This is social faciliitation – the presence of other people affects your performance – drive theory supports this
- Describe social facilitation effects with reference to drive theory and related research studies.
Zajonc’s (1965, 1980) drive theory: The presence of others increases arousal, which strengths the dominant response to a stimulus.
Step 1: Physical presence of others creates physiological arousal,
Step 2: Increased arousal enhances tendency to perform the dominant response (drive)
Step 3: Quality of performance depends on type of task:
- Easy task = successful response
- Difficult task = unsuccessful response
Rockloff & Dyer, 2007 – electronic gambling, the presence of other people changes how other people perform at gambling, fake internet casino, 2 conditions – 1. Playing fruit machines 2. Set up a situation whilst it sounded to the people like other people were winning – this group put a lot more money in
Driving tests (Rosenbloom et al., 2007) – when a boy is being assessed by a man they do worse than when they’re being assessed by a woman
Neuropsychological testing (Yantz & McCaffrey, 2007) - The presence of “virtual” others Social facilitation effects just as evident (Park & Catrambone, 2007). can be computer geerated – in an online context put him (computer generated person) next to you – pops up when youre doing something eays you do better, when youre doing something harder, you dow rose – social facilation happens
- Describe social loafing with reference to the Collective Effort Model.
Social Loafing - Ingham et al. (1974), attempted to replicate Ringlemann’s (1913) rope-pulling study. 102 males took part in Ingham’s task, consisting of two conditions, one where participants were led to believe that they were pulling with a group and the other where they were informed, they were pulling alone. Participants tugged around 20% harder when they thought they were pulling alone (Ingham et al., 1974). This demonstrates the effect of social loafing as the participants exert more effort when alone, showing that with a group, one is likely to contribute less (The CEM Model. Kaura et al., 1993).
The CEM model was originally created by Vroom in 1964 (Kaura & Williams, 1993). It was further developed by Kaura et al. (1993). Kaura et al. (1993) and Smith et al. (2001) who found that self-loafing tends to occur more when the task isn’t meaningful to the participant.
Individuals in group tasks do less as they think they’re in a group.
Later research (e.g. Miles and Greenberg, 1993) – professional swimming – social loafing is not restricted to simple motor tasks.
Karau and Williams (1993) – Collective Effort Model (CEM)
- Meta-analysis of 78 studies. Findings:
1. Loafing happens!
2. Mediated by many variables…
According to the CEF: When do we see reductions in social loafing?
- If people believe their own performance can be identified and evaluated by others.
- The task is important and meaningful to those performing it.
- If people perceive their efforts to be critical to a successful outcome. (so, perceptions of efforts of rest of group are critical)
- If the group; expects to be punished for poor performance; is small; is cohesive (membership in the group is valuable and important to the members and the individuals like each other).
- Aggarwal and O’Brien (2008) – University students
CAN LOOK AT ESSAY IF NEEDED FOR HELP.
- Define groupthink, and provide a real-life example of its occurrence.
The situation where we have a very cohesive group, everyone wants to do something, all having a common goal you’re motivated towards, however, this is bad as too much cohesiveness can make bad decisions as you are getting along with each other so well and focused mainly on getting to the endpoint - “A mode of thinking in highly cohesive groups in which the desire to reach unanimous agreement overrides the motivation to adopt proper rational decision-making procedures” - Hogg & Vaughan (2011, p. 344)
- A need for consensus within excessively cohesive groups: 1. Decision making processes
2. Wider social implications e.g. Jury - people get together and decide if someone is guilty or not guilty - a lot of pressure = miscarriages of justice, can be found guilty of things they didn’t do; Government
3. An alternative explanation for convergence & conformity
Janis (1982) Three characteristics
- Highly cohesive groups
- Group structure
- Stressful situations - more unanimous view on the situation, quicker to want to make a decision
When people get in this groupthink state, it becomes this shared identity of being invulnerable.
REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE: Titanic - a type of groupthink - designing a great boat together - didn’t think it could sink so didn’t put enough lifeboats on - a good example of groupthink
“Illusions of invulnerability” - defective decision-making process - bad decisions
The Challenger Spaceshuttle disaster - people who made it knew there was issues with the rocket, set it off anyway as there was pressure to get it done = groupthink = illusions of invulnerability = rocket blew up within seconds of setting off.
