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What Is a Group?
 A group is two or more people who, for longer than
a few moments, interact with and influence one
another and perceive one another as “us”
 Different groups meet different human needs to
affiliate- part of our evolutionary heritage
 In our ancestry we could not have survived the
harshness of the environment if we did not align
ourselves with others and supported one another
 Sometimes we may be physically together, yet work
individually, not interacting- so we are not a group
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Social Facilitation: How Are We
Affected by the Presence of Others?
 The Mere Presence of Others:
 Early studies found that the presence of others
improves speed f performance on simple tasks ; e.g
Triplett (1898) that bicyclists times were faster when
they raced together
 Social facilitation
 Concept originally referred to simple, well-learned tasks
 Strengthening of dominant responses whether correct or
incorrect in the presence of others
 Boosts performance on easy tasks
 Impairs performance on difficult tasks
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How are the contradictory results regarding the
presence of others explained?
 Zajonc (1965) found that the presence of others causes
arousal and this arousal enhances performance on
easy, dominant, well-learned tasks
 On complex tasks increased arousal (that is- anxiety)
affects performance negatively
Social Facilitation: How Are We
Affected by the Presence of Others?
 Crowding: The Presence of Many Others
 Effect of others’ presence increases with their number
 Arousal and self-conscious attention interferes even
with well-learned responses
 Being in a crowd intensifies positive or negative
reactions
 Enhances arousal which facilitates dominant responses
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Social Facilitation: How Are We
Affected by the Presence of Others?
 Why Are We Aroused in the Presence of Others?
 Evaluation apprehension

Concern for how others are evaluating us
 Driven by distraction

When we wonder how co-actors are doing or how an audience
is reacting, we become distracted
 Mere presence

Can be arousing even when we are not evaluated or distracted
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(more)
 Evaluation apprehension





Concern for how others are evaluating us
People perform the best when their co-actor is slightly
superior
Arousal lessens high-status group is diluted by adding people
whose opinions do not matter to us
People who worry most about what others think are more
affected by their by their presence
The self-consciousness also interferes with behaviors we
perform automatically.
Possible explanation for the mere presence
of others
 Facilitation effects occurs also with animals
 It hints to innate social arousal mechanism common to
much of the species, possibly because of our
evolutionary legacy: In our ancestry we needed to align
ourselves with the group in order to survive
 We were depended on the group and sensitive to the
extent to which the group had evaluated us and
accepted or rejected us
Social Loafing: Do Individuals Exert
Less Effort in a Group?
 Social Loafing
 Tendency for people to exert less effort when they pool
their efforts toward a common goal than when they are
individually accountable
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Historical Background
 Nearly a century ago, French Engineer Ringelmann found
that the collective effort of tug-a-war teams was half of the
sum of individual efforts
 He suggested that group members are less motivated when
performing additive tasks
 When subjects in studies (blindfolded) thought they are
pulling with others they exerted less efforts when they were
led to believe they were pulling by themselves.
 When students work on group projects, sharing a grade,
social loafing often occurs- “free-riders”
Social Loafing: Do Individuals Exert
Less Effort in a Group?
 Many Hands Make Light Work
 Effort decreases as group size increases
 Evaluation apprehension decreases
 Free riders


People who benefit from the group but give little in return
To motivate group members, one strategy is to make
individual performances identifiable.
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Social Loafing: Do Individuals Exert
Less Effort in a Group?
 Social Loafing in Everyday Life
 People in groups loaf less when the task is



Challenging
Appealing
 Rewards are significant
Involving
 Team spirit
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Deindividuation: When Do People
Lose Their Sense of Self in Groups?
 Deindividuation
 Loss of self-awareness and evaluation apprehension;
occurs in group situations that foster responsiveness to
group norms, good or bad
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Deindividuation: When Do People
Lose Their Sense of Self in Groups?
 Doing Together What We Would Not Do Alone
 Group size


Larger the group the more its members lose self-awareness
and become willing to commit atrocities
People’s attention is focused on the situation, not on
themselves
 “Everyone’s doing it” attitude
 They contribute their behavior to the situation rather than to
their own choices
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Deindividuation: When Do People
Lose Their Sense of Self in Groups?
 Doing Together What
We Would Not Do Alone
 Anonymity

Being anonymous
makes one less selfconscious, more groupconscious, and more
responsive to cues
present in the
situation, whether
negative or positive
Children were more likely to transgress by taking extra
Halloween candy when in a group, when anonymous, and,
especially, when deindividuated by the combination of
group immersion and anonymity.
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Deindividuation: When Do People
Lose Their Sense of Self in Groups?
 Doing Together What We Would Not Do Alone
 Arousing and distracting activities


When we act in an impulsive way as a group, we are not
thinking about our values; we are reacting to the immediate
situation
Impulsive group action absorbs our attention
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Deindividuation: When Do People
Lose Their Sense of Self in Groups?
 Diminished Self-Awareness
 Tend to increase people’s responsiveness to the
immediate situation, be it negative or positive
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Group Polarization: Do Groups
Intensify Our Opinions?
 Group Polarization
 Group-produced enhancement of members’ preexisting
tendencies; a strengthening of the members’ average
tendency, not a split within the group
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Group Polarization: Do Groups
Intensify Our Opinions?
 “Risky Shift” Phenomenon
 Occurs not only when a group decides by consensus;
after a brief discussion, individuals, too, will alter their
decisions




Juries
Business committees
Military organizations
Teen drivers: Reckless driving nearly doubles when a 16 or 17
y.o. driver has two teenager passengers rather than one.
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Group Polarization: Do Groups
Intensify Our Opinions?
 Do Groups Intensify Opinions? : Most studies indicate a
tendency for group discussion to enhance the members’
initial tendency, sometimes the average tendency.
 Group polarization experiments



Moscovici and Zavalloni (1969): Found that discussion
enhanced French students’ initial positive attitudes toward
their president and negative attitudes toward Americans
Mititoshi Isozaki (1984) studied “guilty” judgment in legal
case
Markus Brauer, et al. (2001): French students dislike of certain
other people increase after discsuuing their shared negative
impressions.
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Group Polarization: Do Groups
Intensify Our Opinions?
 Do Groups Intensify Opinions?
 In everyday life we associate with people whose attitudes
are similar to our own
 Group polarization in everyday life




Schools: Segregation in gender groups intensifies gender
differences
 Accentuation effect: Over time, initial differences among
groups of college students become accentuated,
Communities
 Self-segregation
Internet
Terrorists organizations
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 September 11, 2001
Group Polarization: Do Groups
Intensify Our Opinions?
 Explaining Polarization:
 Why do groups adopt stances that are more
exaggerated than that of their average member?
 Informational influence:
 Group discussion elicits a pooling of ideas, most of
which favor the dominant viewpoint


Arguments
Active participation produces more attitude change, as the
verbal commitment magnifies the impact
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Group Polarization: Do Groups
Intensify Our Opinions?
 Explaining Polarization
 Normative influence


Social comparison (Festinger)
 Evaluating one’s opinions and abilities by comparing oneself
with others , especially with one’s reference group.
Pluralistic ignorance
 A false impression of what most other people are thinking or
feeling, or how they are responding
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Groupthink: Do Groups Hinder or
Assist Good Decisions?
 Mode of thinking that persons engage in when
concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a
cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic
appraisal of alternative courses of action
 Caused by



Cohesive group
Isolation of the group from dissenting viewpoints
Directive leader
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President Kennedy and advisors debating invasion to
Cuba after Russian put missiles there (1961)
Groupthink: Do Groups Hinder or
Assist Good Decisions?
 Symptoms of Groupthink
 Following lead group members to overestimate their
group’s might and right


Illusion of invulnerability
Unquestioned belief in the group’s morality
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Groupthink: Do Groups Hinder or
Assist Good Decisions?
 Symptoms of Groupthink
 Following leads group members to become closedminded


Rationalization
Stereotyped view of opponent
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Groupthink: Do Groups Hinder or
Assist Good Decisions?
 Symptoms of Groupthink
 Following leads group to feel pressure toward uniformity




Conformity pressure
Self-censorship
Illusion of unanimity
Mindguards: Some members of the group protect the group
from information that would call into question their
decisions.
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Groupthink: Do Groups Hinder or
Assist Good Decisions?
 Critiquing Groupthink
 Directive leadership is associated with poorer decisions
 Groups do prefer supporting over challenging
information
 Groups make smart decisions by widely distributed
conversation with members who take turns speaking
 Group with diverse perspectives outperform groups of
like minded experts.
 Group success depends both on what group members
know and how effectively they can share that
information.
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Groupthink: Do Groups Hinder or
Assist Good Decisions?
 Preventing Groupthink
 Be impartial
 Encourage critical evaluation
 Occasionally subdivide the group, then reunite to air
differences
 Welcome critiques from outside experts and associates
 Call a second-chance meeting to air lingering doubts
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Groupthink: Do Groups Hinder or
Assist Good Decisions?
 Group Problem Solving
 Combine group and solitary brainstorming
 Have group members interact by writing
 Incorporate electronic brainstorming
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The Influence of the Minority: How
Do Individuals Influence the Group?
 Consistency
 Minority slowness effect
 Self-Confidence
 Portrayed by consistency and persistence
 Defections from the Majority
 Minority person who defects from the majority is more
persuasive than a consistent minority voice
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The Influence of the Minority: How
Do Individuals Influence the Group?
 Is Leadership Minority Influence?
 Leadership

Process by which certain group members motivate and guide
the group
 Formal and informal group leaders exert disproportionate
influence
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The Influence of the Minority: How
Do Individuals Influence the Group?
 Is Leadership Minority Influence?
 Task leadership

Organizes work, sets standards, and focuses on goals
 Social leadership

Builds teamwork, mediates conflict, and offers support
 Transformational leadership

Enabled by a leader’s vision and inspiration, exerts significant
influence
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