Group Processes

Social Groups
1. Defined by:
  1. Social roles
    1. behaviour expectations for members
    2. traits can be overtaken by power of role
    3. The Stanford Prison Experiment
      1. People were assigned to roles of prisoner and guards
        Normal people can be dehumanized by the mere assignment to roles
  2. Social norms
    1. group's "laws" on the behaviours and values of its members
      1. if broken, you are punished/rejected
Group cohesiveness
1. Group members - cohesiveness promotes liking
2. Outsiders - cohesiveness increases stereotyping
Destructive groups (cults)
1. group centred around devotion to a person/idea/thing that employs unethical techniques of manipulation
2. has a charismatic leader
  1. self appointed leaders
    1. leader is the focus
      1. state controls everything
        presents itself as innovative and exclusive
        goals are recruiting and fundraising
Deindividuation
1. person loses sense of him or herself as an individual in groups
  1. can occur in crowds, when physically anonymous or in group chanting
2. Social model of deindividuation effect
  1. Deindividuation effects are a result of:
    1. a shift from personal to social identity
    2. decreasing attention to individual characteristics
    3. interpersonal differences in the group
Social facilitation and social loafting
1. Social loafting
  1. people perform worse on simple tasks and better on complex tasks when in a group and not being evaluated individually
2. Social faciliatation
  1. performance is better when doing well learned behaviours in front of others
    1. performance is worse when doing difficult/less practised tasks in front of others
3. Created by an interaction of 3 factors:
  1. Evaluation
    1. Arousal
      1. Task complexity
        how difficult is the task?
      2. are you aroused or relaxed?
    2. evaluation apprehension
      1. concern about what others think of us
4. Distraction conflict theory
  1. in the presence of others, there is a conflict between attending to others or attending to the task
5. Collective effort model
  1. individuals will base their effort on the degree that they think their efforts will be important
Group decision making
1. Process loss
  1. reduction in group performance due to obstacles created by group performance
    1. Ex - problems of coordination and motivation
2. Brainstorming
  1. attempts to increase the production of creative ideas by encouraging members to speak freely
3. Group polarization
  1. groups tend to make decisions that are more extreme than their original choices
4. Group think
  1. desire for harmony in the group results in bad decisions
    1. do not consider other courses of action
      1. extreme form of group polarization
  2. antecedents
    1. highly cohesive
      1. high stress
        non structured decision making
  3. symptoms
    1. illusion of invulnerability
      1. group is morally correct
        pressure to conform
        illusion of unanimity
  4. preventing group think
    1. devil's advocate
      1. everyone must know the person was assigned this role
      2. impartial leader
Transactive memory
1. shared system for remembering information
  1. multiple people remember more information

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	Created by andreaarose over 10 years ago