Group Processes

Group Dynamics Group dynamics is an area of social psychology that studies groups and group processes. A group is defined as two or more people who are interacting with and/or influencing one another.

Facilitation and Inhibition Social facilitation—The mere presence of others can improve performance on well practiced tasks (e.g., Ryan, a pool player, should perform better in front of a large crowd than while practicing his billiard moves alone. Social inhibition—The mere presence of others can impair performance on tasks that one is not particularly good at (e.g., a novice pool player will perform less well in front of a group). Both social facilitation and social inhibition can be explained by arousal. Arousal enhances performance for well-learned or familiar behaviors and hurts performance for difficult or unfamiliar tasks.

Social loafing—On group tasks, people will sometimes exert less effort if individual contributions are not possible to identify (e.g., when working on a group project for class, only a few people from the group will do the majority of the task). Men are more likely to exhibit social loafing than women, and people from individualistic countries are more likely to exhibit this behavior compared to people from collectivistic countries.

The bystander effect claims that behavior is influenced by the number of people available to intervene. Diffusion of responsibility is the tendency for individuals to think others will help, so they do not intervene. In 1964 Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in front of her apartment in New York City at 2:30 a.m. Her murder was overheard by 34 of her neighbors, yet none of them came to her aid. (Later determined not to be fully accurate)

Pluralistic ignorance is the tendency to do nothing because others are doing nothing; everyone assumes everyone else must “know better,” and if others do not respond, then there must not be an emergency. Example: An alarm is sounding and no one is moving. A person assumes that there is no real threat because everyone else is acting as if things are normal. Deindividuation is giving up normal behavioral restraints to the group. Being less self conscious and restrained in a group situation may account for mob behavior (e.g., students at pep assemblies are more likely to behave badly at the assembly if they cannot be identified individually for their behavior). Deindividuation may account for much fan behavior (good and bad) at sports games (painting faces, screaming insults, and so on). It can also lead to the popular concept known as mob mentality

Real Life Examples of Deinviduation Prison environments can lead to deindividuation, as demonstrated in Zimbardo’s 1972 study at Stanford University. Male college student volunteers were assigned to either guard or prisoner roles and given appropriate uniforms and rules to follow. The simulation was ended in just 6 days after guard–prisoner interactions became increasingly aggressive. The deindividuation in the prison setting seemed to produce cruel and unacceptable guard behavior toward prisoners. This process may also explain the behavior of some Army personnel toward prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Three perspectives suggest how deindividuation effects behavior: (a) Deindividuation lessens a person’s inhibitions against engaging in harmful actions. (b) Deindividuation increases a person’s responsiveness to external cues. (c) Deindividuation increases a person’s observance to group norms

Groupthink Groupthink is a mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for unanimity in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. This mode of thinking can result in bad group decisions when, rather than defend their own ideas, individual group members simply go along with the group.

Conditions that increase the likelihood of Groupthink 1. The group is highly cohesive. 2. There is a distinct and directive leader. 3. The group is isolated from other influences. 4. There is time pressure or intense stress. 5. The leader already has his or her mind made up.

Example: A popular student at school declares that he/she is going to have an impromptu protest about “unreasonable” school rules. Other students need to decide quickly if they will join the protest. Rather than think through the relatively unsound reasoning behind the decision to protest, other students decide to join the protest.

Majority and Minority Influence Group polarization occurs when a group supports a decision supported by the majority of the group following a group discussion. Minority influence occurs when a confident and persistent minority group influences a decision made by a whole group.