Research methods in group dynamics

Question 1

What was the official beginning of the study of group dynamics?

Answer 1

Group dynamics did not have a single, clearly defined beginning.

Question 2

Who claimed that crowds have a psychology independent of the psychology of its members? When was this?

Answer 2

Gustave Le Bon: Psychologie des Foules (1895)

Question 3

What did Le Bon say were characteristics of crowds?

Answer 3

Impulsiveness, exaggeration of sentiments, and inability to reason were all characteristics of crowds.

Please note that crowds have a special place in French history.

Question 4

What kind of studies paved the way for the study of groups?

Answer 4

Anthropological studies of small-scale societies

Question 5

How did Wundt study groups?

Answer 5

Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie, though mostly devoted to what we would call cultural psychology, also looked at groups and their products.

looking at how groups produce cultural objects (myths, legends, art, etc.)

Question 6

What did studies of voting behaviour lead to?

Answer 6

Studies of voting behaviour led political scientists to study small groups of networked individuals.

Political studies - ads/propoganda do not have much effect on voting behaviour/political opinions. - Personal messaging (friends, family, etc.) have much greater effect

Question 7

What is the levels of analysis problem?

Answer 7

Should groups be studied at the group level (i.e. as entities in their own right, with characteristics independent of the individuals that make them up)?

Or should group actions be thought of as nothing more than the outcome of many individual actions?

Question 8

What did Durkheim study? What did he find?

Answer 8

in his study of suicide, found that many suicides seem to be a product of failure to belong to a group and the resulting anomie.
Anomie was a lack of collective representations, which are essential to group living (and maybe all living).

• you are motivated to do/accomplish things because of the relationships that you have (to make others happy/get their approval, due to obligations to others, etc.) and this will guide your behaviour - anomie is the absence of this state of belonging to others

Question 9

Who denied that groups are anything more than collections of individuals and was a strong advocate for study at the individual level?

Answer 9

Floyd Allport

Question 10

Typically, what type of researchers study the group level? What type studies the individual level?

Answer 10

Sociologists look at the group level and psychologists look at the individual level

Question 11

Thinkers like Le Bon and Durkheim often invoked what concept?

Answer 11

group mind, with some implication that telepathy or something similar was involved

Question 12

Is the concept of group mind correct?

Answer 12

This appears to be wrong, though people do behave differently in groups than they do as individuals.
Group norms seem to play a pretty big role in this.

Question 13

What was one of the most fruitful ways of thinking about group processes? Whose theory is this? What is it called?

Answer 13

interactionism (person and environment codetermine actions) has been very helpful. B=f(P, E)

each person’s behavioral, cognitive, and emotional reactions (“behavior”), B, are a function of his or her personal qualities, P, the social environment, E,

was launched by Kurt Lewin, whose field theory is not much used now but whose idea has been very helpful

Question 14

What principles did Lewin follow?

Answer 14

Gestalt

Question 15

What is the multilevel perspectives approach that is used today?

Answer 15

micro-level (individuals), meso-level (group-level processes), and macro-level (the social and nonsocial environment in which the group finds itself) interact with each other to produce behaviour

Question 16

What are the methods of measurement of group dynamics?

Answer 16

Observation
Self-report

Question 17

What are the downsides to covert and overt observation of groups?

Answer 17

Covert observation has some ethical issues.

Overt observations risks falling afoul of the Hawthorne effect, (the tendency of people to behave differently when they know other people are watching them)
One form of overt observation is participant observation, in which the observer participates in the social processes being studied.
This can probably lead to deeper insight, but also stronger effects on the group.

Question 18

What type of observations are used in qualitative studies? Why?

Answer 18

Unstructured observations are used in qualitative studies and are especially valuable if the group or the process being studied is poorly understood and it is not clear what variables to focus on.

Question 19

What are the advantages and disadvantages of structured observation?

Answer 19

Structured observation, often with a coding scheme or checklist, can lead to counting of behaviours and quantitative analyses, but can also miss behaviours not on those coding schemes.

Question 20

What are the two famous structured observational schemes for studying groups? Who developed these?

Answer 20

One famous scheme is the Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) of Robert Freed Bales.
This codes behaviours of group members into 12 categories, including 6 task-oriented ones and 6 relationship categories.

Later, Bales elaborated this scheme and created the Systematic Multiple Level Observation of Groups (SYMLOG). The number of categories was increased to 26.

Question 21

What are the important issues in observation and measurement?

Answer 21

Reliability: consistency across time, components, and raters

Validity: to what extent are you measuring what you want to measure?

Question 22

What are the two types of self-report data that are frequently used?

Answer 22

Sociometry: Asking people who they like, who they spend time with (who they dislike), etc.
Data are displayed on a sociogram

Social Network Analysis (SNA): a similar term for a somewhat more developed set of techniques.

Question 23

A case study in group dynamics studies what? What is an example of this?

Answer 23

a case is a group

Irving Janis’s Victims of Groupthink, which was a set of six case studies designed to illustrate bad decision-making from groups that appear to have competent members, which he claimed was due to groupthink.

Question 24

What are the advantages and disadvantages of case studies of groups?

Answer 24

Advantages: Can provide very rich and nuanced information on a particular case, especially if a bona fide group is used (i.e. not a group that was created in the laboratory).
If phenomena have been observed but the processes are poorly understood, case studies can be helpful.

Disadvantages: Generalization is very problematic; is this group unique?
A related problem: It is very hard to infer cause and effect.

Question 25

What is a famous example of a correlational study done on groups? Whose study was it?
What were the conclusions?

Answer 25

a study by Newcomb that found that, in the 1930s, students tended to enter the university with right-wing political views but tended to move in a more left-wing direction over time.
He wondered why.

By administering questionnaires longitudinally over a period of four years, he found that the people whose attitudes changed the most were also the most popular (i.e. they spent the most time interacting with other people).

He interpreted this as meaning that peer pressure was the cause of the attitude changes.

Question 26

Why were Newcomb’s conclusions of his study unwarranted? What lesson is there in this mistake?

Answer 26

Correlational studies are quite bad for inferring causation.
For example, maybe adopting left-wing points of view helped those people become more popular.
Also, maybe agreeableness both makes people more likely to become popular and more likely to be persuaded by left-wing views.

This is the direction of causation problem –
Any time you see that variables A and B are correlated, you always have to consider three possibilities:
A causes B.
B causes A.
Some third variable C causes both A and B.

Question 27

What is a famous experimental study of groups? Whose study? When?

Answer 27

Lewin et al did a very famous study in 1939 in which they had groups of boys carry out a laborious but boring task under the leadership of either an authoritarian leader who just told them what to do, a democratic leader who helped them decide things for themselves, or a laissez-faire leader who provided little guidance of any sort.

Question 28

What were the findings of Lewin’s 1939 study of boys carrying out boring tasks?

Answer 28

Laissez-faire groups were very dysfunctional.
Groups led by authoritarian leaders were the most productive, but people tended to slack off when the leader was not present and there was also a lot of acting out (e.g. scapegoating).

Question 29

Which method of research is best for studying groups?

Answer 29

It is not the case that one method is the best. Instead, since different methods have different advantages and disadvantages, multiple methods are probably best.

Question 30

What are the 5 main perspectives for theories of group dynamics?

Answer 30

motivational
behavioural
systems
cognitive
biological

Question 31

What are thought to be the drivers of behaviour in the motivational perspective? What is an example of this?

Answer 31

Motivations and emotions are thought to be the drivers of behaviour in this perspective.
For example, group behaviour may be so common because groups are good places for people to fulfill their needs.

Bowling Alone - people are still bowling the same amount but not as a part of bowling groups - studied why this trend towards less joining behaviour has happened over time - concluded that partly because of the invention of TV (less boredom through at-home activity - boredom used to drive people to join groups)

Question 32

What is the main theory within the behavioural perspective?

Answer 32

Social exchange theories suggest that people within social groups engage in exchanges in which each provides reinforcing experiences for the others.

Question 33

What kind of rewards are referenced by the social exchange theory? What is their purpose?

Answer 33

This includes not just tangible rewards such as the money I get for working at UFV, but also socio-emotional rewards such as status and approval.
Relationships within the group are seen as arising and becoming stronger as a result of repeated exchanges of this sort.
Rewards must be valued, other group members must be trusted, fairness must prevail, and it is expected that members will develop a commitment to the group.

Over the long run, relationships emerge after a long period of mutually exchanged favours, they are seen as reliable/trustworthy

Question 34

What is the systems perspective?

Answer 34

interacting components of a system that are interdependent will tend to create a self-maintaining, dynamic system that adapts to circumstances

Question 35

What is one class of systems perspectives? Explain it.

Answer 35

input-process-output (IPO) models.

Inputs include not just resources available to the group and tasks that groups undertake but also the abilities and predispositions of the group members and the norms, roles, etc. of the group.

Process is the dynamic interaction of the inputs within the group.

Outputs are often aspects of group performance.

Question 36

What is the thinking behind the cognitive perspective of group dynamics?

Answer 36

Just as individuals can be thought of as engaging in information- processing when they solve a problem, groups can be thought of in the same way.

Groups may modify the thought processes of individual members.

Furthermore, communication within the group makes possible group-level information processing.

Question 37

How does the self-reference effect relate to groups? Which perspective uses this example?

Answer 37

Your book gives the example of the self-reference effect, the tendency for words to be remembered better if we are asked to relate them to ourselves. It turns out there is also a group-reference effect that is just as strong.

cognitive perspective

Question 38

What two biological factors (from the biological perspective) play a role in group behaviour?

Answer 38

High-testosterone males tend to be most motivated to take on leadership roles within a group (though their performance is often terrible once they get there).

Oxytocin is a hormone that is associated with stronger trust of and caring for other group members, though it is also associated with more hostility to outgroups.

Question 39

How do you choose a perspective to approach the study of group dynamics?

Answer 39

The perspectives are not mutually exclusive.
Integration of multiple theories may be especially valuable.