1. Group Processes
Seminar 7

2. What is a group?

3. Which of these are meaningful groups?
Members of Film Society
Your family
Ashoka Students
Males
Husband and wife
Social psychologists
A group of people occupying the same elevator
People who like watching Desperate Housewives
Psychology majors
Twins
People who wear Google glass
People who notice other people wear Google glass

4. Entitativity: An index of “groupness”
How much a social group seems like a coherent unit rather than simply a collection of individuals. 
What makes people feel like a group?
Similarity
Common fate
Proximity
Goodness of form
Resistance to intrusion
Campbell (1958). Common fate, similarity, and other indices of the status of aggregates of person as social entities. Behav Sci.

5. Why do people join groups?
Functionalist perspective
Psychological (need for belonging)
Instrumental
People are selective in what groups they join
Need to distinguish identity (recall: social mach bands experiment)

6. Social facilitation
What happens when people are in groups?

7. Classic paradigms in social facilitation
Social facilitation: An improvement in performance in the presence of others.
General experimental paradigm
Perform task in private
vs.
Public
Strobe. (2012). The truth about Triplett (1898), but nobody seems to care. Pers Psyc Sci.

8. The debate in social facilitation
Is performance improved or impaired in “public” (audience or co-actor) conditions ?
Decades of confusing results
Resolution: Zajonc (1965)
The role of dominant (habitual, well-learned) responses:
If dominant response yields incorrect answer: hurts performance
If dominant response yields correct answer: helps performance

9. Zajonc study Pronounce words between 1 and 16 times
Creates “dominant” response:
Words pronounced most frequently = dominant
Words flashed very quickly: 1/100 second
Participants guess word
If others are present, more likely to guess “dominant” words

10. The cockroach study Cockroaches placed in runway Bright light shown
Run to other end of runway to escape light
Cockroach “spectators” or not
Perform faster with spectators
But only if maze is simple
Zajonc. (1969). Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach. J Pers Soc Psy.

11. Practical implications?
Archival data from Ministry of Transport, Israel.
Apart from the presence of a driving instructor, test- takers were tested alone or with observer (another testee) in the backseat for economic reasons.
Which percentage belongs to which group?
49%
pass
34%
pass
Rosenbloom et al. (2007). Success on a practical driver's license test with and without the presence of another testee. Acc Analy Prev.

12. Something else from the driving study…
Rosenbloom et al. (2007). Success on a practical driver's license test with and without the presence of another testee. Acc Analy Prev.

13. Social Loafing
Output of individual is diminished when working in a group
Ringelmann
Why no social facilitation?

14. Presence of others SOCIAL LOAFING SOCIAL FACILITATION
Enhanced performance on simple tasks
Individual efforts can be evaluated
Arousal/ distraction
Impaired performance on complex tasks
Presence of others
SOCIAL LOAFING
Impaired performance on simple tasks
Individual efforts cannot be evaluated
Little arousal/evaluation apprehension
Relaxation
Enhanced performance on complex tasks

15. Individual differences in social loafing

16. Deindividuation
What happens when people are in groups, but others don’t “see” them?

17. Imagine this
You drink a potion that would make you totally invisible for 24 hours and were completely assured that you would not be detected or held responsible for your actions. What would you do?

18. Theories of Deindividuation
Original view: loosening of normal constraints on behavior when people are in a crowd
Leading to…“mob behavior”

19. Newer view of Deindividuation
Two factors
Lower accountability
Increases obedience to “local” norm
Nowadays…

20. Singaporeans are angry

22. Group Decision Making
What happens when people make a collective decision?

23. Initial issues Most major decisions in the world are made by groups
Why?
Are groups always better than single individuals?

24. Wisdom-of-the-crowds: Transactive memory
Groups collectively encode, store, and retrieve knowledge Provides the group members with more and better knowledge than any individual could access on his/her own
Sparrow et al. (2011). Google effects on memory. Science.

25. Problem 1: Members sometimes fail to share unique information
Shared information condition
Unshared information condition
4-member team each received same information of job candidates: A, B, and C. Candidate A is the obvious best, 8 positive, 4 negative traits:
4-member team each received same information negative information, but unique number of positive information about job candidates: A, B, and C. 8 4
Member 1
Member 2
Member 3
Member 4
Member 1 2 4
84%
chose A
24%
chose A
Member 2 2 4
Member 3 2 4
Member 4 2 4

26. Problem 2: Groupthink
Excessive tendency to seek concurrence among group members (“herd mentality”)
Valuing group cohesiveness and solidarity more than the need to consider the facts in a realistic manner.
Can lead to disastrous decisions
Cuba’s Bay of Pigs
Challenger disaster (1986)
US-Iraq war

27. Defective decision making
The road to groupthink
Antecedents
Group is (already) cohesive
Isolated
Directive leader
Stress
Poor decision-making rules
Symptoms
Illusion of invulnerability
Moral certainty
Stereotyped view of outgroup
Self-censorship
Pressure to conform
Illusion of unanimity
Defective decision making
Incomplete survey of alternatives
Failure to examine risks of favored alternative
Poor information search
Few contingency plans

28. Problem 3: Group polarization
Original finding (Stone, 1962) seemed to suggest “risky shift”
Newer view: group polarization, not riskiness per se
Whatever way the group is leaning initially, members tend to polarize further in that direction

29. Risky shift, Cautious shift

30. Real world implications of group behavior

31. Identity fusion theory
Humans are like onions
Personal-level identity
Private self
Community-level identity
Social-level identity
Social self
(social identities)
_______-level identity
Swann & Burhmester (2015). Identity fusion. Curr Dir Psy Sci.

32. Identity fusion
The feeling of oneness: Private identity “fuses” with group identity
Can you name some examples?
____________
Measuring identity fusion

33. What happens when group identities are threatened?
Time 1: Spanish participants’ level of identity fusion was measured
Time 2: Wrote an essay describing themselves
Received pos vs. neg feedback regarding their Spanish identity
DVs: “I would fight someone [physically threatening another Spaniard], [insulting or making fun of Spain], [help others get revenge on someone who insulted Spain], etc.”
What would you predict?

34. Identities are fluid
Social categorization can be spontaneous (more about this in the week on Stereotypes & Prejudice)
We have so many identities
Males vs. females
Professors vs. husband
Indian vs. Earthling
Hence: Identity fusion can exist as both a trait and state
Implications for activation of state-level identities on self-sacrifice…?

35. Group discussion
What makes a terrorist?

36. Take home messages People are social beings, but highly selective ones
Being in groups has its pros and cons