Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Groups and Individuals – The consequences of belonging

Groups: collections of people who perceive themselves as forming a cohesive unit to some degree

• Common-bond groups: the members tend to be bonded with each other
• Common-identity groups: members tend to be linked via the category as a whole 
• Entitativity: the extent to which the group is perceived to form a coherent entity

Basic aspects of groups involve:

• Status: position or rank within a group
• Roles: To the extent that people internalize their social roles, where those roles are linked to aspects of their self-concept, they can have important implications for behavior and well-being (e.g.: being assigned to act as “prisoner” or “guard” in a prison simulation)
•  Norms: Implicit rules about what is appropriate
  • Norms of individualism and collectivism can affect our willingness to tolerate dissent within groups
  • Cohesiveness: factors that cause people to want to remain members

The benefits of being part of a group

• Increased self-knowledge
• Progress toward important goals
• Higher status
• Enhanced sense of control
• Possibility of attaining social change - especially if a politicized collective identity develops
• BUT: loss of personal freedom and often heavy demands

When do individuals withdraw from a group?

• Group has changed so much that it no longer reflects their basic values or beliefs
• Schism: division of people based on ideology

Intergroup sensitivity effect: Ingroup critics are tolerated more than outgroup critics because they are seen as having the ingroup’s interests at heart

Audience and performance:

• Social facilitation: he mere presence of other people can influence our performance on many tasks
• Drive theory of social facilitation: the presence of others is arousing and can either increase or reduce performance, depending on whether dominant responses in a given situation are correct or incorrect
• The distraction conflict theory: social facilitation stems from the conflict produced when individuals attempt, simultaneously, to pay attention to the other people present and to the task being performed
• Evaluation apprehension view: an audience disrupts our performance because we are concerned about their evaluation of us

Social loafing: reduced output by each group member especially on additive tasks where member contributions are combined

• Can be reduced by:
  • making outputs individually identifiable
  • increasing commitment to the task and task importance
  • ensuring that each member’s contributions to the task are unique

Influence of crowds

• Anonymity in a crowd induces more normative or conforming behavior
• Deindividuation can intensify either aggressive or prosocial behavior, depending on what norms are operating in a particular crowd context

When does cooperation work?

• Negative interdependence: if one person obtains a desired outcome, others cannot (e.g.: job position)
• When there is a lack of social embeddedness where the reputation of others is unknown, being able to communicate about past performance can increase cooperation
• Social dilemmas: where individuals can increase their own gains at the expense of the others can decrease cooperation

Conflict can be reduced by bargaining and the induction of superordinate goals

Fairness of treatment:

• Distributive justice: individuals’ judgments about whether they are receiving a fair share of available rewards
• Procedural justice: judgments concerning the fairness of the procedures used to distribute available rewards among group members
• Transactional justice: the extent to which people who distribute rewards explain or justify their decisions and show respect and courtesy to those who receive the rewards

Group polarization

• People in groups tend to make more extreme decisions than individuals
  • Wanting to be “good” group members
  • Members are influenced by the group’s discussion which tends to focus on arguments that favor the group’s initial preference
• Groupthink: a tendency to assume that others can’t be wrong and that information contrary to the group’s view should be rejected

Brainstorming: where people attempt to generate new ideas in a group (not more effective than working alone)

Leadership:

• The glass cliff: Nontraditional leaders often emerge during times of crisis
• Leaders who are seen as prototypical of their group are perceived as more effective, and even when they fail they are more likely to be forgiven

References:

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited

--Chapter 11