Psychology Social Psychology Groups, Helping Behavior & Review
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Groups
Social psychologists consider a group to be composed of two or more people who interact and depend on each other in some way. Examples of groups include a baseball team, an Internet listserv, a college psychology class, and a cult.
Features of Groups
Groups usually have the following features:
- Norms that determine appropriate behavior
- Roles that are assigned to people that determine what behaviors and responsibilities people should take on
- A communication structure that determines who talks to whom within the group
- A power structure that determines how much authority and influence group members have
Example: A college psychology class has norms, such as when people should arrive for class. The professor’s role includes teaching, inviting discussion, and administering exams. The students’ role is to attend class, listen to lectures, read materials, and pose questions. The communication structure of the class demands that students listen without talking to each other while the professor lectures. The power structure gives the professor more authority than any of the students. Some students also may have more authority and influence than other students, such as those who are more familiar with the class material.
Conformity
Conformity is the process of giving in to real or imagined pressure from a group. In the 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch did a famous study that demonstrated that people often conform.
Asch’s Conformity Study
Asch recruited male undergraduate subjects for the study and told them that he was doing research on visual perception. He placed each subject in a room with six accomplices. The subject thought that the six were also subjects. The seven people were then given a series of easy tasks. In each task, they looked at two cards, one with a single line on it and the other with three lines of different lengths. The people were asked to decide which line on the second card was the same length as the line on the first card. On the first two tasks, the accomplices announced the correct answer to the group, as did the subject. On the next twelve tasks, the accomplices picked a line on the second card that was clearly a wrong answer. When put in this situation, more than one-third of the subjects conformed to the choices made by their group.
Factors that Influence ConformityAsch and other researchers have found that many factors influence conformity:
- Group size: Asch found that group size influenced whether subjects conformed. The bigger the group, the more people conformed, up to a certain point. After group size reached a certain limit, conformity didn’t increase any further.
- Group unanimity: Asch also found that subjects were much more likely to conform when a group agreed unanimously. If even one other person in the group disagreed with the group, a subject was much less likely to conform. This was true even when the other dissenter disagreed with the subject as well as the group.
Researchers have found that conformity also increases when:
- A person feels incompetent or insecure
- The person admires the group
- The group can see how the person behaves
Reasons for Conforming
People have many reasons for conforming:
- They want to be accepted by the group, or they fear rejection by the group. In this case, the group is exerting normative social influence.
- The group provides them with information. In this case, the group is exerting informational social influence.
- They want a material or social reward, such as a pay raise or votes.
- They admire the group and want to be like other group members.
Productivity in Groups
Research shows that productivity tends to decline when a group of people are working on a task together. This happens for two reasons: insufficient coordination and social loafing.
Insufficient Coordination
When many people work on a task, their efforts may not be sufficiently coordinated. Several people may end up doing the same portion of the task, and some portions of the task may be neglected.
Social Loafing
Social loafing, which contributes to declines in the productivity of a group, is the reduced effort people invest in a task when they are working with other people. Diffusion of responsibility contributes to social loafing. A person does not feel as responsible for working on a task if several others are also present, since responsibility is distributed among all those present.
Social loafing is particularly likely to happen in the following circumstances:
- When the group is large
- When it is difficult to evaluate individual contributions to a task
- When people expect their coworkers to pick up the slack
Social Facilitation
In some circumstances, individuals perform better when other people are present. This phenomenon is called social facilitation. Social facilitation is more likely to occur on easy tasks. On difficult tasks, people are likely to perform worse in the presence of others.
Group Decision-Making
Members of a group are often required to make decisions together. Three concepts related to group decision-making are groupthink, group polarization, and minority influence.
Groupthink
Groupthink is the tendency for a close-knit group to emphasize consensus at the expense of critical thinking and rational decision-making. In a groupthink situation, group members squash dissent, exert pressure to conform, suppress information from outside the group, and focus selectively on information that agrees with the group’s point of view.
Groupthink is more likely to occur when groups have certain characteristics:
- High cohesiveness. Group cohesiveness is the strength of the liking and commitment group members have toward each other and to the group.
- Isolation from outside influences
- A strong leader
- The intent to reach a major decision
Group Polarization
The dominant point of view in a group often tends to be strengthened to a more extreme position after a group discussion, a phenomenon called group polarization. When a group starts out with a dominant view that is relatively risky, the group is likely to come to a consensus that is even riskier. This phenomenon is called risky shift .
Minority Influence
A committed minority viewpoint can change the majority opinion in a group. Group members are more likely to be influenced by a minority opinion when the minority holds the opinion firmly.
Deindividuation
When people are in a large group that makes them feel aroused and anonymous, they may experience deindividuation. When people become deindividuated, they lose their inhibitions and their sense of responsibility and are not self-conscious about their behavior. Deindividuation is a major reason for the violence that sometimes happens in mobs.
Helping Behavior
Social psychologists study the circumstances in which people offer help to others.
The Bystander Effect
Research shows that people are less likely to offer help to someone in distress if other people are also present. This is called the bystander effect. The probability that a person will receive help decreases as the number of people present increases.
Diffusion of responsibility contributes to the bystander effect. A person does not feel as responsible for helping someone if several others are also present, since responsibility is distributed among all those present.
Influences on Helping
Researchers have proposed that bystanders who witness an emergency will help only if three conditions are met:
- They notice the incident.
- They interpret the incident as being an emergency situation.
- They assume responsibility for helping.
Researchers suggest that people are most likely to help others in certain circumstances:
- They have just seen others offering help.
- They are not in a hurry.
- They share some similarities with the person needing help.
- They are in a small town or a rural setting.
- They feel guilty.
- They are not preoccupied or focused on themselves.
- They are happy.
- The person needing help appears deserving of help.
Reasons for Helping Others
Some social psychologists use the social exchange theory to explain why people help others. They argue that people help each other because they want to gain as much as possible while losing as little as possible. The social responsibility norm also explains helping behavior. The social responsibility norm is a societal rule that tells people they should help others who need help even if doing so is costly.
Another norm that explains helping behavior is the reciprocity norm, which is the implicit societal rule that says people must help those who have helped them.
Social Traps
When people act in their own interest, they can sometimes help others as well. However, in other circumstances, people can harm themselves and others by acting in their own self-interest. This sort of situation is called a social trap. Global warming is an example of a social trap: it is occurring because people act in their own self-interest when they buy fuel-inefficient cars.
Quick Review
Impressions
- People form impressions about others through the process of person perception.
- People’s physical appearance strongly influences the way they are perceived by others.
- People are particularly influenced by physical attractiveness and baby-faced features.
- Social schemas affect how people perceive events and other people.
Stereotypes and Prejudice
- Stereotypes are beliefs about people based on their membership in a particular group.
- Stereotypes tend to be difficult to change.
- Stereotyping has some important functions, but it can also distort reality in dangerous ways.
- Evolutionary psychologists believe that people evolved the tendency to stereotype because it gave their ancestors an adaptive advantage.
- A prejudice is a negative belief or feeling about a particular group of individuals.
- Prejudice is pervasive because it serves many social and psychological functions.
- Researchers find it difficult to measure prejudice. They often measure implicit rather than explicit prejudice.
- People who identify strongly with their ingroup are more likely to be prejudiced against people in outgroups.
- Research shows that there are effective ways to reduce prejudice.
Attribution
- Attributions are inferences people make about the causes of events and behavior.
- Attributions can be classified along two dimensions: internal vs. external and stable vs. unstable.
- People often make incorrect attributions because of the fundamental attribution error, the self-serving bias, and the just world hypothesis.
- Cultural values and norms affect the way people make attributions.
Attitudes
- Attitudes are evaluations people make about objects, ideas, events, or other people. They can be explicit or implicit and can include beliefs, emotions, and behavior.
- Attitudes vary according to strength, accessibility, and ambivalence.
- Attitudes do not always affect behavior.
- The foot-in-the-door phenomenon and the prison study show that behavior can affect attitudes.
- Theories that account for attitude change are learning theory, dissonance theory, and the elaboration likelihood model.
Social Influence
- Some common social influence strategies are the foot-in-the-door technique, the lowball technique, manipulation of the reciprocity norm, and feigning scarcity.
- Persuasion involves a source, a receiver, a message, and a channel.
- Credible, likable sources are more likely to be persuasive.
- Many features of the source, receiver, and message influence persuasion.
- Coercive persuasion involves limiting freedom to choose and preventing clear reasoning.
Attraction
- Interpersonal attraction refers to positive feelings about another person.
- Physical attractiveness, proximity, similarity, and reciprocity influence attraction.
- Romantic love includes passionate and compassionate love.
- Compassionate love includes intimacy and commitment.
- Infant attachment styles tend to be reproduced in adult relationships.
- There are both similarities and differences among cultures in romantic attraction.
- Evolutionary psychologists speculate that the tendency to be attracted to physically attractive people is adaptive.
Obedience and Authority
- Obedience is compliance with commands given by an authority figure.
- Stanley Milgram’s obedience study showed that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures.
- The degree of obedience depends on many situational factors.
- People sometimes carry obedience to extremes.
Groups
- A group is a social unit composed of two or more people who interact and depend on each other in some way.
- Groups tend to have distinct norms, roles, communication structures, and power structures.
- Conformity is the process of giving in to real or imagined pressure from a group.
- Solomon Asch did a famous study that showed that people often conform and that social roles influence behavior.
- Factors that influence conformity include group size and unanimity, level of competence, liking for the group, and group observation of the behavior.
- People conform because of normative social influence, because of informational social influence, because they want to gain rewards, and because they identify with the group.
- Insufficient coordination and social loafing contribute to lowered productivity in groups.
- Social facilitation may occur in some group situations.
- Groupthink, group polarization, and minority influence affect decision-making in groups.
- Deindividuation sometimes occurs in large, anonymous, arousing groups.
Helping Behavior
- People are less likely to offer help in the presence of other people.
- Bystanders are more likely to help people in some circumstances than others.
- Explanations for helping behavior include social exchange theory, the social responsibility norm, and the reciprocity norm.
- A social trap is a situation in which acting in one’s own self-interest can harm both the actor and others.
