Social behaviour - the influence of groups Flashcards
What is a group?
- Collection of people with shared features or attributes
- experienced (belongingness) - ethnicity, occupation, team
What are in-groups and what are out-groups?
In groups (us) - emphasising individuality Out groups (them) - core traits, often negative, all alike
What is affected when work is carry out in a group/ in the presence of others?
- productivity
- types of decision made
- attitudes and behaviour
What is meant by social facilitation in a group?
- better performance in competition
- improved merely by being observed
What is meant by social inhibition in a group?
as tasks get more complex
- more errors
- poorer performance
- distracting
- easy tasks are completed easier alone
- peer support for difficult tasks is useful but as complexity increases it becomes not useful
What does the rope pulling task show about group productivity?
- As the group size increasing, each individual reduces their individual pull
- they loose motivation and co-ordination
What is meant by social loafing?
- Social loafing refers to the concept that people are prone to exert less effort on a task if they are in a group versus when they work alone
- working less hard
- unclear/different standards
- output equity - others loaf too
How can we reduce social loafing?
- make individual contributions identifiable
- emphasise valuable individual contributions
- keep group size at an appropriate level
Are group more likely to make conservative (cautious) decisions? What is this known as?
No
Risky shift: a group consensus is almost always riskier than the average decision made by individuals prior to a group discussion
What is meant by group polarisation?
Group polarisation occurs when discussion leads a group to adopt attitudes or actions that are more extreme than the initial attitudes or actions of the individual group members.
influence
e.g number of people that find breastfeeding in public unacceptable is greater after discussion
How does group polarisation work?
- novel/persuasive arguments
- social comparison and social desirability
- discussion produces a commitment
Why do we help others?
-cultural norms - social responsibility norm. give freely to those in need
the reciprocity norm - help people who help us
What type of people are helpful?
- altruists (or egotists?)
- in a good mood
- men (helping women)
- those who feel competent
What are norms?
- shared beliefs regarding appropriate conduct e.g laws
- behaviours that characterise groups
- inherently resistant to change
What did Solomon Asch’s experiment show?
- questions with simple answers were used to a panel of students
- one participant intentionally gave the wrong answer to see if naive participants would change their answer based on the previous, evidently incorrect one
- naive participants changed their answers in 12/18 trials
- huge individual variation was shown
- in control with no one intentionally giving a false answer, less than 1% of responses were wrong, so the task was unambiguous
