Social psychology
Chapter 11
Interaction and performance in groups
Interdependence: each group member’s throughts, emotions, and behaviors influence the others’.
Social facilitation: improvement and impairment
Even when interdependence is minimal, the mere presence of others can produce arousal, either because the other people are highly evaluative or because they are distracting.
- Arousal improves performance of easy, well-learned behaviors
- Arousal often interferes with performance of novel or complex tasks.
Social facilitation: an increase in the likelihood of hihgly accessible responses, and a decrease in the likelihood of less accessible responses, due to the persence of others.
Even the virtual presence of virutal others can cause these effects.
Evaluation apprehension
When we focus on what other people think about us, it creates arousal, with sometimes postive and sometimes negative effects on performance.
Most of the time, we want other people to value, include, and like us. Ou self-esteem is greatly affected by what others think of us.
The presence of others who are in a posititon to judge us produces evaluation apprehension, which changes our performance in the way predicted by social facilitation theory.
Distraction
The presence of others can also disctract us from our task, also creating arousal and impacting performance. However, with specific types of tasks, distraction can focus us on taks-relevant cues, potentially improving performance.
Others can distract us.
Their mere presence causes us to think about them, to react to them, or to monitor what they are doing, and thereby deflects attention from the task at hand.
Our impulses to do two different things at once, conentrate on the task and to react to others, start to conflict wich each other, we become agitated and aroused.
This arousal will typically improve performance on simple tasks and interfere with it on difficult tasks.
The presence of others also requires people to split their attention between the other people and the task at hand.
Being crowded is arousing because crowds create many opportunities for evaluation and distraction.
Task interdependence: reliance on other members of a group for mastery of material outcomes that arise from the group’s task.
Social interependence: relieance on other members of the group for feelings of connectedenss, social and emotional rewards, and a positive social identity.
How groups change: stages of group development
Face-to-face groups usually go
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