Lecture 7: Ch 8 & Aronson - Group Processes & Environmental Sustainability Flashcards
What is a group?
A set of individuals who directly interact over time and have a shared fate, goals, or identity
**Distinct from collectives: people engaging in a common
activity with little direct interaction with each other
Why join a group?
People join a group to need others to accomplish things (e.g., orchestra, sports) or for basic human needs (safety in numbers, reproduction) and Social identity
- Key features: roles, norms, cohesiveness
What are role?
Set of expected behaviours
* Can be formal or informal
What are the 2 fundamental types of roles?
Instrumental and Expressive
What are instrumental roles?
Helps group achieve tasks
What are expressive roles?
Provides emotional support and maintains morale
How does a group function better?
When members are
assigned roles that best match their talents and personalities
* Role uncertainty related to issues
What are norms?
Norms are rules of conduct for members.
- Can be formal or informal
- Groups often exert strong conformity pressures on members who deviate from norms
- Groups vary in tolerance to norm violations
What are tight cultures?
Strong norms and little tolerance for norm deviating behaviour
What is loose culture?
Weaker norms and greater tolerance for deviant behaviour
What is Social Facilitation?
When the presence of others enhances performance on easy tasks but impairs performance on difficult tasks (Kassin et al., 2021)
What was Triplett’s cyclist research?
Triplett noticed that cyclists who competed against others performed better than those who cycled alone against the clock.
After dismissing various theories of the day (our favorite is “brain worry”), he proposed his own hypothesis: The presence of another rider releases the competitive instinct, which increases nervous energy and enhances performance.
How did Triplett test his hypothesis?
To test this proposition, Triplett got 40 children to wind up fishing reels, alter- nating between performing alone and working in parallel. Triplett reported that children were more likely to perform better when they worked side by side than when they worked alone.
What is the Zajonc 3-Step Solution?
- Presence of others = physical arousal, energizes behaviour
- Arousal enhances tendency to perform dominant response
- Quality of performance varies
based on type of task
What was the Zajonc Cockroach Studies?
Zajonc and his colleagues (1969) had cock- roaches placed in a brightly lit start box connected to a darkened goal box. When the track was a simple one, with a straight runway between the start box and the goal box, cockroaches running in pairs ran more quickly toward the goal box than did those running alone.
But in a more complex maze that required a right turn to reach the goal box, solitary cockroaches outraced pairs.
In a particularly creative follow-up experiment, Zajonc and his colleagues found that cockroaches completed the easy maze faster, and the difficult maze slower, if they raced in front of a crowd of spectator cockroaches than if they raced with no audience.
How did the researchers get cockroaches to participate as spectators? The researchers placed cockroaches in plexiglass “audience boxes” along either side of the maze, and this “audience” produced social facilitation.