 PAPER TOPICS DISCUSSED!!
What is a group?
 What is a group? Size? Purpose? Time? Number of





members? Frequency?
Is a dyad a group?
What makes a group, groupier? (entitativity)
What do groups do for us? (why be in groups? What
needs do they meet?)
Who joins groups?
Do we want a cohesive or noncohesive group?
More on groups
 In what ways are groups multi-level?
 How is it similar to/different from a social identity?
Brief history of major group studies















Newcomb 1943
Asch 1955
Milgram 1963
Sherif 1936 (autokinetic)
The American Soldier
Deutsch & Gerard 1955 conformity w/magic pad
Festinger, Schachter, & Bach, 1950
Schachter deviant study
Schachter study of affliliation (1959)
Minimal group paradigm
Social loafing/social facilitation
Deindividuation
Group polarization
Ostacism (later)
Shared information paradigm
When are groups good vs. bad?
 When are groups better than or worse than




individuals?
When is diversity good/bad?
Cohesion?
Why does group polarization occur?
How does the shared information bias affect decision
making?
Groupthink (Janis, 1952)
 Does it really occur very often?
 Antecedents:
strong group cohesion, (mixed)
insulation from outside influences (historical)
homogeneity of attitudes (both)
a directive leader, (both)
high stress (threats to group)
poor decision-making procedures
low situational member self-esteem
Symptoms:

illusion of invulnerability

belief in the moral correctness of the group

stereotyped views of out-group

self-censorship

direct pressure on dissenters to conform

illusion of unanimity

mindguards (members protect leader from contrary views)
Consequences:

incomplete survey of alts

failure to examine risks of the favored alternative

poor info search

failure to develop contingency plan

biased assessment of risks, costs, benefits, and moral implications

failure to reconsider later
Baron’s (2005) ubiquity approach
 Only antecedents needed are:
 Sense of social identity
 Salient norms
 Low situational self-efficacy
 And broader than thought
 Examples?
Examples of group research
 Group affiliation and Schachter (1959) study on social
comparison theory
 Sociometrics (Moreno)
 Social facilitation
 Triplett
 Zajonc’s 1965 cockroaches
 Social loafing
 Ringelmann
 Latané, Williams, and Harkins, 1979
 Kohler effect
 How can you reduce social loafing?
 Brainstorming
More examples
 Group polarization
 Dislike of deviants (Johnny Rocko)
 SIT explanation?
 Conformity
 Computer-mediated communication
 What are the stages of groups? Do all groups go
through these?
Power
 French and Raven’s (1959) 5 types of power
 Reward
 Coercive
 Legitimate
 Referent
 Expert
 How does power trigger activity? What is good and
bad about power?
Leadership
 How do leaders emerge?
 What makes a good leader?
 Contingency vs. situational theory
 Lewin et al. (1939) autocratic vs. democratic vs. laissez-
faire leaders
 How do women fair as leaders?
 How does SIT explain leadership?
Social identity vs. social sharedness
 Explain the assumptions/predictions of each approach
 How would you use the two together to create a




situation for better decision making in a workgroup?
Relate each to evolutionary processes
Two companies merging—deciding on new processes
Putting people into ethnically diverse groups to decide
how to handle diversity issues at a university
Deciding how to market a new product
Social identity theory (Tajfel &
Turner, 1978)
 How did this theory evolve and how did it differ from
other theories of the time?
 Psychological processes
 Social categorization
 Social comparison
 Social identification
 How can people deal with devalued identity?
 Which will they choose?
 What are advantages and criticisms of the theory?
Expansions on SIT
 Hogg and Abrams “self-esteem hypothesis”
 Brewer’s optimal distinctiveness theory
 Swann’s fusion theory
More Social Identity Theory (the
“other SIT”)
 How do SIT and SCT differ?
 What is a social identity?
 What motivates us to have social ids?
 What are your social IDs?
 What affects what is salient? Can more than 1 be at a
time?
 What are some examples/applications?
Relate SIT to
 System justification
 Groupthink
 Group polarization
 Conformity
Social sharedness
 Tindale, Smith, Dykema-Engblade, & Kluwe, 2012
 Two types
 Shared preferences
 Shared task representations
 Others?
 According to this approach, when will group decisions
be good vs. bad?
Residential mobility
 Why would residential mobility relate to what kinds of
groups people join?
 What are the implications for groups?
 Why would movers join more groups overall?
Flow
 Csikszentmihalyi
 What is flow?
 When do you feel flow?
Facebook
 Contagion article (Kramer et al., 2014)
 What was justification for the article?
 Problems/issues/solutions?
 What would social identity theory predict for facebook
communications?
 What would social sharedness predict?
 MORE PAPER TOPICS
 Next week read attraction part of 12 and all of 13 plus
articles
 Finkel et al. article—carefully read the following parts:
 Summary
 Introduction
 All sections with “conclusions” in the heading
 Summary and Implications
 Skim the rest