Diversity and Intergroup Behavior

LECTURE 7

Groups

• Our world contains not only 6 billion individuals but also 200 nation-states, 4 million local communities, 20 million economic organizations, and hundreds of millions of other formal and informal groups –couples on dates, families, churches, and so on.

• How do these groups influence individuals?

What is a group?

• The answer to the question seems self-evident – until several people compare their definitions.

• Are jogging partners a group? Are airplane passengers a group? Is a group a set of people who identify with one other, who sense they belong together? Is a group those who share a common goal? These are among the social psychological definitions of a group.

What is a group?

• Group dynamics experts argue that all groups have one thing in common: Their members interact.

• Some group dynamic experts define a group as two or more people who interact and influence one another.

What is a group?

• Social Psychologist Turner (1987) notes that groups perceive themselves as “us” in contrast to “them.”

Social facilitation

• Are we affected by the mere presence of another person?

• More than a century ago, Triplett (1898), a psychologist interested in bicycle racing, noticed that cyclists’ times were faster when racing together than alone.

• Other experiments have found that others’ presence also improves the speed with which people do simple multiplication problems, and motor tasks.

Social facilitation

• However, over 300 studies have found that the presence of another person can hurt performance on difficult tasks.

Social facilitation

• The effect of other people increases with their numbers. Being in a crowd also intensifies positive or negative reactions.

• In experiments with Columbia University students, researchers had the students listen a funny tape or watch a move with other subjects. When they all sat close together, the accomplice could more readily induce the subjects to laugh and clap.

Social facilitation

• Perhaps you’ve noticed that a class of 35 students feels more warm and lively in a room that seats just 35 than when spread around a room that seats 100.

• This occurs partly because when others are close by, we are more likely to notice and join in their laughter or clapping.

Why are we aroused in the presence of others?

• Experiments suggest that the arousal stems partly from evaluation apprehension.

Social Loafing

• Social facilitation usually occurs when people work toward individual goals and when their efforts, can be individually evaluated.

• What happens when people pool their effort toward a common goal where individuals are not accountable for their efforts?

Social Loafing

• Researchers interested in the policy implications of social loafing have tested this in the lab.

• For example, one study found that students pumped exercise bicycles more energetically (as measured by electrical output) when they knew they were being individually monitored than when they thought their output was being pooled with that of other riders.

• In the group condition, people were tempted to free ride on the group effort.

Social Loafing

• Researchers have found that university swim team members swim faster in intrasquad relay races when someone monitors and announces their individual times (Williams & others, 1989).

• This parallels what happens when students work on group project for a shared grade.

Social Loafing

• Researchers have found that groups can decrease evaluation apprehension.

• When people are not accountable and cannot evaluate their own efforts, responsibility is diffused across all group members.

• By contrast, the social-facilitation experiments increased exposure to evaluation. When made the center of attention, people self-consciously monitor their behavior.

Social Loafing

• So the principal is the same: When being observed increases evaluation concerns, social facilitation occurs; when being lost in a crowd decreases evaluation concerns, social loafing occurs.

Social Loafing

Does collective effort always lead to slacking off?• Sometimes the goal is so compelling and

maximum output from everyone is so essential that team spirit maintains of intensifies effort.

• In an Olympic crew race, will the individual rowers in an eight-person crew pull their oars with less effort than those in a one- or two- person crew?

• The evidence assures us they will not.

Social Loafing

• Collective effort does not always lead us slacking off. Sometimes the goal is so compelling and maximum output from everyone is so essential that team spirit maintains or intensifies effort.

• The research shows that people in groups loaf less when the task is challenging, appealing, or involving (Karau & Williams, 1993).

Social Loafing

• Groups also loaf less when their members are friends or identified with the group, rather than strangers (Davis & Greenlees, 1992; Worchel & others, 1998).

• Researchers note that Israel’s communal kibbutz farms have actually out produced Israel’s noncollective farms.

• And studies in Asia reveal that people in collectivist cultures exhibit less social loafing than do people in individualist cultures (Karau & Williams, 1993).

Deindividuation

• In 1991 an eyewitness videotaped four LA police officers hitting unarmed Rodney King more than 50 times – fracturing his skull in 9 places with their nightsticks and leaving him brain damaged – while 23 police officers watched passively.

• Replays of the tape shocked the nation into a long discussion of police brutality and group violence.

Deindividuation

• People wondered: Where was the officers’ humanity? What had happened to standards of professional conduct? What could provoke such behavior?

Deindividuation

• Social facilitation experiments show that groups can arouse people.

• Social loafing experiments show that groups can diffuse responsibility.

• When arousal and diffused responsibility combine and normal inhibitions diminish, the results may be startling.

Deindividuation

• People may commit acts that range from a mild lessening of restraint (throwing food in the dining hall, screaming during a rock concert) to impulsive self-gratification (group-vandalism, orgies, thefts) to destructive social explosions (police brutality, riots, lynchings).

Deindividuation

• In a 1967 incident, 200 University of Oklahoma students gathered to watch a disturbed fellow student threatening to jump from a tower. They began to chant “Jump. Jump. . . . “ The student jumped to his death (UPI, 1967).

Deindividuation

• These unrestrained behaviors have something in common: They are somehow provoked by the power of a group. Groups can generate a sense of excitement, of being caught up in something bigger than one’s self. It is harder to imagine a single rock fan screaming deliriously at a private rock concert, a single Oklahoma student trying to coax someone to suicide, or even a single police officer beating a defenseless motorist.

Deindividuation

• In certain kinds of group situations, people are more likely to abandon normal restraints, to lose their sense of individual identity, to become responsive to group or crowd norms – in a word, to become what social psychologists label “deindividuated.”

Deindividuation

What circumstances elicit this psychological state?

• Group size--a group has the power not only to arouse its members but also to render them unidentifiable.

Deindividuation

• Another circumstance is physical anonymity--For example, in one experiment, Zimbardo (1970) dressed NY University women in identical white coats and hoods. Asked to deliver electric shocks to a woman, they pressed the shock button twice as long as did women who were visible and wearing large nametags.

Group polarization

• Many conflicts grow as people on both sides talk mostly with like-minded others.

• Does such interaction amplify preexisting attitudes? If so, why?

Group polarization

• Research shows that group discussion often strengthens members’ initial inclinations.

• This led investigators to propose what Moscovici & Zavaloni (1969) called a group polarization.

Group polarization

• Dozens of studies confirm group polarization. • For example, Moscovici & Zavaloni observed

that discussion enhances French students’ initially positive attitude toward their president and negative attitude toward Americans.

Group polarization

• Does discussion with like-minded people strengthen shared views as well as magnify the attitude gap that separates the two sides?

Group polarization

• Myers & Bishop (1970) wondered about that. So they set up groups of relatively prejudiced and unprejudiced high schools students and asked them to respond – before and after discussion – to issues involving racial attitudes, such as property rights versus open housing.

Group polarization

• They found that the discussions among like-minded students did indeed INCREASE the initial gap between the two groups.

Naturally occurring group polarization

• In everyday life people associate mostly with others whose attitudes are similar to their own.

• Look at your own of circle of friends. Does everyday group interaction with like-minded friends intensify share attitudes?

Group polarization in schools

• One real-life parallel to the lab phenomena is what education researchers have called the “accentuation phenomenon.”

• Over time, initial differences among groups of college students become accentuated.

Group polarization in schools

• If the students at college X are initially more intellectual than the students at college Y, that gap is likely to grow during college.

Group polarization in schools

• Likewise, compared to fraternity and sorority members, independents tend to have liberal political attitudes, a difference that grows with time in college (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991).

• Researchers believe this results partly from group members reinforcing shared inclinations.

Group polarization in communities

• Polarization also occurs in communities. During community conflicts, like-minded people associate increasingly with one other another, amplifying their shared tendencies.

• Gang delinquency emerges from a process of mutual reinforcement within neighborhood gangs, whose members share attributes and hostilities (Cartwright, 1975).

Group polarization in communities

• From their analysis of terrorist organizations around the world, McCauley & Segal (1987) note that terrorism does not erupt suddenly.

• Rather, it arises among people whose shared grievances bring them together.

Group polarization in communities

• As they interact in isolation from moderating influences, they become progressively more extreme.

• Massacres are group phenomena, enabled by the killers egging each other on (Zajonc, 2000).