Lecture 8 - Intragroup and Intergroup Processes Flashcards
What is a group in Social Psychology?
In social psychology, groups refer to at least two people who share common characteristic/s or goals that are socially meaningful to themselves or others.
In Social Psychology, what does it mean when we talk about interdependence?
Group interdependence refers to the extent to which each members thoughts, feelings and actions influence and impact the others.
What are the two subcategories of interdepence that are referred to in social psychology?
Task interdependence and Social Interdependence.
Task inderdependence refers to the extent to which members are reliant on each other for the mastery of certain material goals through collective performance.
Social interdependence refers to the extent to which members are reliant on each other for feelings of relatedness, connection, respect and acceptance.
What are some of the types of groups focused on in social psychology?
Primary or intimacy groups - e.g. family and friends - primary role these groups serve is social interdependence.
Secondary or task groups - e.g. sports group, debate group, work colleagues - main concern/importance is task interdependence, but social interdepence can influence task success/performance.
What is one of the most famous models/theories of Group Formation used in Social Psychology?
Tuckman’s 1965 theory of group formation (generally new groups) involves five steps:
1. Forming - people come together and try and understand the structure/hierarchy of the group - usually facilitated by a group organiser
2. Storming - negotiation and conflict - can be task and relationship and process conflicts - generally relationship and process conflicts can be quite detrimental, but task conflicts can eventually be beneficial and drive progress, growth, creativity etc, unless also accompanied by relational and process conflict
3. Norming - once conflicts start to settle and resolve, norms start to appear, people feel a stronger sense of belonging/membership and trust in other members
4. Performing - Members feel committed to the group and performance is at highest - there is a large exchange of information, conflicts that do arise are resolved for efficiently and effectively
5. Adjourning - in this stage there is dissolution of the group, e.g. because the group fulfilled their role/goal. This can be a difficult time if the group has become part of the members’ identity.
NB: Not all groups go through these phases, and also these phases are not always linear. There can be regression etc.
According to Tuckman’s 1965 theory of Group Formation, when is group performance at its peak?
During the Performing stage of group formation, rather understandably.
What is Group Socialization?
Group socialisation refers to the cognitive, behavioural and affective changes that occur for people as they join and leave pre-existing groups.
Moreland and Levine (1988) propose three phases of these changes and social influences from both the new member and the existing members.
1. Investigaton: the new member gathers information about the group and vice versa.
2. Socialization: The group attempts to mould the new member into one of them, to make a ‘team player’. In this process the new member begins to adopt the norms, internalise group knowledge and becomes committed.
3. Maintenance: once the new member has gone through socialisation they then take on a specific role and feel committed to engaging in and acting out the role, at least in the context of the group.
What is Social Facilitation and what was one of the seminal works that studied this phenomenon?
Social Facilitation refers to the phenomenon that people perform better when there are other present.
Triplett (1898) was one of the first to examine this is in a scientific way, using his ‘competition machine’.
Why was Triplett’s theory of social facilitation revised after Markus’ 1978 experiment?
Markus (1978) performed an experiment where people performed two types of tasks; one familiar and one novel (putting on shoes or dressing in clothes that were novel and complicated). They performed these tasks under three conditions: with someone present, with someone watching them or alone. What they found was that performance of the task was improved for the familiar task, but impaired for the unfamiliar task.
I can really relate to this, thinking about starting a new job.
This finding lead to the revising of Triplett’s theory of Social Facilitation: the presence of others improves performance if the task is familiar, and impairs performance if the task is unfamiliar.
i.e. the influence of social faciliation is task-specific.
What is Social Loafing and what was one of the seminal studies that looked at this phenomenon?
Social Loafing refers to the tendency to exert less effort on a task if you are in a group. A seminal work in this area was done by Latane et al. (1979) looking at the loudness of clapping and cheering when people were alone or in a group, finding that as group size increased volume decreased for both clapping and cheering.
What are some ways to decrease likelihood of social loafing?
Four ways discussed.
Some ways to decrease social loafing are:
1. Decrease group size.
2. Improve the actual task by making it interesting and more involved.
3. Increase accountability.
4. Increase commitment to or identification with the group.
Is Social Loafing more common in Collectivist or Individualistic cultures?
Social Loafing is more common in Individualistic cultures.
What is de-individuation?
De-individuation refers to the psychological state where the group norms and values are more salient than a person’s individual norms and values.
What was one of the seminal works discussed in the lecture that looked at de-individuation in groups?
In 1979 Johnson and Downing performed an experiment where they had participants dress up in either a nurse or klan uniform and then either have a face covering (mask for nurse, hood for klan uniform) or not and then they had these participants engage in a Milgram-like experiment where they had to deliver “shocks” to other participants in a “learning task”.
What they found was that those in the nurse uniform delivered less shocks, and even less when they had the mask on. On the other hand, those wearing the klan uniform delivered more shocks and even more shocks when they had the hood on.
The interpretation of these results was that when we decrease individuation through having people where uniforms that represent membership to a group with well-established norms and values they are more likely to engage in behaviour that is in aligment with those norms and values and are more likely to do this when they are are even less individuated (As in the case of when they wore face coverings).
What is meant by intergroup processes?
This term refers to the psychological processes that occur when we become and are members of a group.
What is Social Categorisation?
Social categoristation refers to the psychological process of categorising people into groups, stereotypes, identities based on common or perceived characteristics.
What is self-categorisation?
Self-categorisation refers to how we categorise ourselves in reference to others and whether we are part of the same or different groups. We perceive ourselves as representative of a group and as others as representative of their group, as opposed to us all being individuals.
When self-categorisation occurs in the extreme, there can be de-individuation, where a person loses sight of their individual values and beliefs and becomes enmeshed with the group values and beliefs.
What is Doise’s Category Differentiation model (1978)?
My understanding is that in this model the similarities between group members are accentuated and the differences between groups are highlighted, increasing the sense of us and them.
When previously unlabelled points/characteristics are made salient and part of group membership classifications, then the similarities between group member are accentuated and the differences between different groups are accentuated. This results in, often arbitary, distinictions between people that have real-world influences on peoples’ experience of life.
In a study done by Platz and Hosch (1988) what were they looking at and what were their findings?
In this study they looked at Texas store clerks of different races - Anglo-America, African-American, and Mexican-American. Using confederates of these different races as customers, they wanted to see the effect of race on whether the store clerks would remember the customers. What they found was that the clerks had a higher accuracy of remembering the customers if they were of the same race as them.
This was evidence for the idea that we are more able to remember individuals and identify them/see more characteristics that make up their unique identity when they are a part of the same racial group.
What is one of the main, and often damaging, consequences of Social Categorisation?
The generation of Stereotypes.
Define Stereotypes and Stereotyping.
Stereotypes are a result of social categorisation. Stereotypes are a cognitive representation of the traits, characteristics and beliefs about a certain group. Whilst not the same as prejudice, stereotypes are where prejudice arises from.
Stereotyping is the cognitive process of viewing someone through the lens of a preconceived idea of what it means to be a member of a certain group.
Stereotypes can be automatically activated, such as perceiving just gender and automatically adjusting perception of an individual.
What is an Implicit Association Test?
Implicit Association Tests (IATs) were first presented by Greenwald et al. (1998) and are an implicit measure of associations between social categories and other concepts.
They measure our implicit attitudes, such as self-esteem or prejudice, or stereotypes.
They work by measuring the response time to correctly responding to words associated with different group memberships and concepts given the rules of the task. An example would be, tap your left hand if a man’s name or a word associated with career appears on the left, and tap your right hand if a woman’s name or a word associated with family appears on the right. Response times are measured and then measured again with the concept words are switched. If there is an implicit attitude to associated men with career and women with family then the response times in the second round will be longer than in the first round/or the measure of error.
What was the study done by Duncan in 1976 that looked at how we view behaviour based on stereotypes and what were the findings?
Duncan (1976) did a study where one confederate shoved another confederate in such a way where it was ambigous as to whether the shove was playful or aggressive. The shover and shoved confederate were either African-American or Anglo-American. Anglo-American participants observed this shove and then were asked whether they thought the shove was aggressive or not. When the shover was African-American then the white participants were much more likely to say that the shove was aggressive than when the shover was white. This was evidence for the stereotypes that white americans have about black americans, namely that black people are aggressive.
Stereotypes spill over into prejudice and discrimination. In terms of cognition (beliefs), attitudes and behaviour describe the difference and association between stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination.
Stereotypes are the beliefs we have about people based on their membership to a group.
Prejudice refers to the attitudes (generally negative) we have toward people based on the stereotypes we have of their group membership.
Discrimination refers to negative behaviour exhibited and directed toward people based on their group membership, which is initiated by prejudice, which in turn is generated from stereotypes.
NB: Positive prejudice can still lead to negative discrimination.
