Week 7: Group Processes Flashcards
What is a group?
2 or more individuals that are connected by social relationship - some type of bond-, the type of relationship vary depending on the group
What is Entitativity? What factors can work to increase it?
The degree to which a group (collection of people) feel like a cohesive group.
Factors that can increase it:
- a common bond: the degree to which members interact and depend on eachother
- common identity: whether they share challenges/threats/ other characteristics
What are reasons to join a group? Positives of being in a group?
- some groups you don’t join you are born into 🧑🧑🧒🧒 (aka family)
- reducing uncertainty both in how to behave and mortality concerns - feel part of a bigger network
- for belonging, strengthening relationships and fostering sense of inclusion - increases self esteem (SIT and ingroup bias)
-achieving goals: from evolutionary perspective those in groups are more likely to survive
What are the 4 types of groups?
Primary groups: close and intimate relationships with which you have a strong emotional bond ❤️ (family and friends)
Social groups: larger, long term interaction but ofter centered around a goal 💼(work, sports team, school)
Collectives: large aggregations of people with similar behavior which are all at the same place at the same time (people at a concert, football crowd) 🎸 it is at this level that contagion, convergence and emergent norms appear
Categories:collection of people that share one common characteristic (age, gender, ethnicity, occupation) 🧑🔬- you don’t necessarily interact with the majority of people in your group
What are Tuckman’s 5 stages of group development - with the same goal to achieve?
1) forming stage: 🧊 when members meet eachother, be polite
2)Storming stage 🌪️: where first conflict emerges because people voice their different opinions. Disruption is essential for development of later norms/roles
3) Norming stage 🌈: conflict resolved, more norms decided on
4) Performing stage 🎭: focus shifts to task accomplishment, everybody has their assigned part to complete
5) adjourning stage 👋: when task is finished members dissolve and move onto other tasks. Closure
Provide an example of a dilemma used to study cooperation?
The prisoner dilemma ⛓️💥; explores whether people favor self-interest or larger social interest.
Participants paired and are given choice to rat out partner and get a reduced sentence or remain silent and be let off the hook. Both members recieve same info. Findings show that what the partner did in one round is reciprocated by the other in the following round.
What is a resource dilemma?
A dilemma where two groups have to cooperate to share a finite amount of resources. Same phenomenon can be explored using distribution games - whether distribution is fair and how others react.
When and why do people cooperate?
When:
-when there is a shared goal/common threat
- strong relationships with trust
-expectations (social norms) to behave in a certain way
- when individual work is perceived as valued
-when part of big societies cooperation is ESSENTIAL for functioning
Why:
-increased oxytocin increases willingness to act trustworthingly
-to achieve a certain goal
- reciprocity (i will owe you one…)
- improve reputation and social standing
- social norms and values
- group identity
What is social facilitation?
The tendency of people behaving differently when they are in a group compared to when they are alone. presence of others will improve performance on certain tasks.
What does the Drive Theory of Social Facilitaion suggest?
If task has been mastered being observed whilst completing it will improve performance (children wheeled fishing rod 🎣 faster if with partner)
If task hasn’t been mastered doing it in front of others causes anxiety and inhibits performance. (Being observed while solving complex math 🧮)
Phenomena also observed with cockroaches 🪳 completing a maze alone/with a partner/with and audience. In simple maze were faster with partner + audience whereas in complex maze were faster alone.
How does the presence of others change our behavior (with regards to Drive theory of Social Facilitation)? What personality traits can help to reduce this?
If presence of others is seen as a
-challenge: performance will improve, vasodialation will improve blood flow to muscles and organs
- threat: performance will worsen: vasoconstriction will make it harder for blood to reach organs
- presence of others increases social evaluation, the threat of social evaluation ‘takes’ all of cognitive resources not allowing us to complete the task
Personality traits like high self-esteem and extroversion act as a buffer to stress caused by presence of others
What is social loafing? How does the Ringelmann Effect study this?
The tendency for individuals to work less when they are in a group compared to when they are alone
Ringelmann effect: people were told to pull on a rope 🪢 but streangth and number of people didn’t increase in a linear way.
This phenomenon was also explored getting people to shout in headphones whilst being told they were alone with other 2/5 people. Loudest alone 🗣️
What causes social loafing?
- when individual contributions aren’t identifiable
- when people don’t find the task meaningful
- expecting low efforts from others
- lack of competition
What is social compensation?
When highly motivated individuals work harder to try and compensate the social loafing of other team members. They do so because they believe other people are incompetent/unmotivated
What is deindividuation? How does it affect individual’s behavior?
- when indivisuals loose their senso of individuality in a croud/group
Effect: - people are more likely to act like others even if the actions go against their personal attitudes and standards (like in wars and riots)
- fosters increased unity and sympathy 💐–> it increases donations to charity
