Social and dispositional factors affecting crowd and collective behaviour Flashcards
Social factors affecting crowd and collective behavior
Social loafing
culture
deindividuation
Dispositional factors affecting crowd and collective behavior?
Locus of control
morality
What is social loafing?
this is the theory that people put in less effort when working in a group. Everyone in the group is helping so responsibility is diluted.
What is culture? How does it affect social loafing?
A culture is a group of people that share the same beliefs. Studies show that in some cultures social loafing doesn’t affect how hard someone works this is due to some cultures being more individualistic and others being more collective cultures.
deindividuation
when in a group we don’t use the same moral compass we will normally use. We lose our sense of individuality, we feel we aren’t held responsible when in the face of a faceless crowd.
Locus of control
this refers to the sense we have about what directs events in our life. ( internal or external)
Morality
the sense of right and wrong an individual possesses
Strength of social loafing
The clapping experiment showed that in a group people didn’t put in as much effort to clap for everyone. Responsibility has been diffused. This is supporting evidence.
Weakness of social loafing
In creative tasks, people perform better working in groups. This means it depends on the task being done. Social loafing can’t be applied to certain tasks.
Strength of culture (social loafing)
EARLY experiment - Chinese worked better in groups but Americans didn’t, this is supporting evidence that culture is a social factor affecting crowd and collective behavior.
Weakness of culture (social loafing)
It could be argued that it is a bit too vague. A country may have many different cultures within it which may equally affect collective behavior. For example, big cities may have more in common with big cities in different countries than small villages in the same country.
Strength of Deindividuation
Zimbardo’s car study showed that when they left a car unattended in new york the car was stripped for parts immediately however in a small town it wasn’t touched. This shows living in big cities can cause deindividuation which might lead to anti-social behavior.
weakness of Deindividuation
Anonymity can affect personal behavior in a bad way but not all the time for example the Johnson and downing experiment, where when dressed in high socially accepted uniforms less electric shocks were given for example with people in nurse uniform
