Group processes

Explain social influence in a group

context.
What makes up a group?

• 5 people waiting at the corner for a

bus?
• People attending a worship
service?
• The rolling stones fan club?
• The students in a seminar class?
• The students in our class?
 • It is a set of individuals who have
direct interactions with each other
over a period of time and share a
What is a common fate, identity, or set of goals
(Kassin, Feinand Markus, 2017).
group? • It is consist of people who have joint
membership in a social category
based on sex, race, or other attributes
(Kassin, Fein and Markus, 2017)
 • The complexities and ambitions of human
life require that we work in groups
• Humans have an innate need to belong to
groups

Why Join • May not only protect against physical threat,

but also help gain personal and social identity

a Group?
• Social identity theory
▪ people’s feelings of self-worth comes
from their identification with particular
groups
▪ groups often give us meaning and
purpose
 Roles - Can be:
Key Features of • Formal roles are designated by titles: teacher or student
Groups: Roles, in a class, vice president or account executive in a
corporation.
Norms, and • Informal roles are less obvious but still powerful.

Cohesiveness • Fundamental types of roles:

• Instrumental role to help the group achieve its tasks
• Expressive role to provide emotional support and
maintain morale.
Norms Can be:
• Formal rules, the written rules.
• Informal norms are more subtle.
 What to wear?  What language to use? Etc.
Key Features of Groups: Roles, Norms, and
Cohesiveness
Culture and Norms - Pertii (1968)‘s “tight” and “loose” cultures:
• Tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for behavior that deviates from the
norm.
• Loose cultures have relatively weaker norms and greater tolerance for deviant behavior.

Cohesiveness - Group cohesiveness refers to the forces exerted on a group that push its
members closer together.
▪ If a group is cohesive, members are likely to feel committed to the tasks, feel positively
towards other members, feel group pride, and engage in many interactions in the group.
 Social Facilitation: When Others Arouse Us

• How does the presence of others affect our behavior?

• Triplett’s (1897-1898) fishing reel studies.
• Later research found conflicting findings.
– Sometimes the presence of others enhanced performance.
– At other times, performance decreases.
 1. The presence of others creates general
physiological arousal, which energizes
behavior. All animals, including humans,
Three- tend to become aroused when in the
presence of conspecifics—that is, members

step of their own species

2. Increased arousal enhances an individual’s

process tendency to perform the dominant

response.
3. The quality of an individual’s performance
varies according to the type of task.
 • Zajonc’s Mere Presence Theory
According to Zajonc, the presence of others increases
arousal, which can affect performance in different ways,

Why Does depending on the task at hand.

• Evaluation Apprehension Theory

Social – It’s not just about presence
– They must be in a position to evaluate
Facilitatio • Distraction–conflict theory
- points out that being distracted while we’re working on a
n Occur? task creates attentional conflict

Taken as a package, these two effects of the presence of others

—helping performance on easy tasks but hurting performance
on difficult tasks—are known as social facilitation.
Social Loafing: When
Others Relax Us
• A group-produced reductions in individual output.
• Cyberloafing. A form of social loafing in the workplace. It involves
personal nonwork use of online technology, such as online shopping,
watching videos, or messaging friends
At some point, in a group task or project, individuals exerted less
effort, and individuals simply demonstrated poor coordination when
working together—some pulled while others relaxed and vice versa.
Social Loafing: When Many Produce Less
Ever been part of a group that just wasn’t
effective?
Three strategies to reduce the incidence of social
loafing:
• limit the scope of the project—projects that are very large and
complex should be broken into smaller components;
• keep the groups small; and
• use peer evaluations
 •Collective Effort Model:
Why Does Individuals try hard on a collective
task when they think their efforts
Social Loafing will help them achieve outcomes,
Occur? they personally value.

Collective Effort
Model: It Has
to Be Personal
 Deindividu
ation
• The loss of a person’s sense of individuality and the reduction of
normal constraints against deviant behavior.
Elements that contribute to deindividuation: ✓ arousal, ✓ anonymity,
and reduced feelings of individual responsibility.

What can lead to deindividuation?

Environmental Cues
Two types of environmental cues that make deviant
behaviors more likely to occur:

• Accountability cues affect the person’s cost-reward

calculations.

• Attentional cues focus a person’s attention away from the

self.
Moving From Personal
to Social Identity
• Social identity model of deindividuation
effects (SIDE), proposes that whether
deindividuation affects people for better or
for worse, it reflects the characteristics and
norms of the group immediately
surrounding the individual as well as the
group’s power to act according to these
norms.
Group • Groups often perform better than the
best individuals on tasks in which , the
Performan correct answer is clearly evident to
everyone in the group once it is
ce: presented, and the work on the task can
be divided up so that various
Problems subgroups work on different aspects of
the task.
and • Process loss refers to the reduction of
group productivity due to problems in
Solutions the dynamics of a group.
Brainstorming
•A technique that attempts to increase the production of creative
ideas by encouraging group members to speak freely without
criticizing their own or others’ contributions.
• Rules for brainstorming call for a freewheeling:
• Express all ideas that come to mind even if they sound crazy.
• The more ideas, the better. Don’t worry whether the ideas are good or bad,
and don’t criticize anyone’s ideas; they can be evaluated later.
• All ideas belong to the group, so members should feel free to build on each
other’s work.
Brainstorming in Groups: Problems
and Solutions
 Electronic
Brainstorming
Why Electronic Brainstorming is Effective?
 • the exaggeration through group discussion of
initial tendencies in the thinking of group
members.
Group What causes group polarization?
➢ Persuasive arguments theory, the greater the
Polarizati number and persuasiveness of the arguments to
which group members are exposed, the more

on extreme their attitudes become .

➢ It can be on based on how people compare
themselves to fellow group members as well as
to outgroup members
Groupthink
• an excessive tendency to seek concurrence (that is, agreement or uniformity) among group
members.
• A kind of thinking in which maintaining group cohesiveness and solidarity is more important than
considering the facts in a realistic manner.
Preventing Groupthink:
• Avoid isolation, groups should consult widely with outsiders.
• Reduce group pressures to conform, leaders should explicitly encourage criticism and not take a
strong stand early in the group discussion.
• Establish a strong norm of critical review, subgroups should separately discuss the same issue, a
member should be assigned to play devil’s advocate and question all decisions and ideas, and a
“second chance” meeting should be held to reconsider the group decision before taking action.
Communicating • Information Sharing and Biased
Information and Sampling
Information sharing and group
utilizing decisions were much better when group
expertise members had to make a plan of when
and how they would review alternatives
before settling on their ultimate decision.
Biased sampling. The tendency for
groups to spend more time discussing
shared information (information already
known by all or most group members)
than unshared information
Informatio • “If some bias, error, or tendency predisposes individuals to
process information in a particular way, then groups
exaggerate this tendency. However, if this bias, error, or

n tendency is unlikely among individuals processing the

information (e.g., less than half the sample), then groups
are even less likely to process information in this fashion”.

Processing • Transactive memory, helps groups remember more

information more efficiently than individuals.

and Elements of a good transactive memory systems:

 Everyone must know who knows what.

Transactiv  The group members must be able to trust each other’s

specialized knowledge.

e Memory
 The group members need to coordinate their efforts so that
they can work together on a task smoothly and efficiently.
 Goals and Plans in Training and
Virtual Teams
Groups Technology
• A group is likely • Group support • sometimes called
to be more systems (or group dispersed teams,
committed to decision support are “groups of
doing a certain systems), these people who work
task if they have a programs help interdependently
specific, remove with shared
challenging, and communication purpose across
reachable goals. If barriers and space, time, and
a group doesn’t provide structure organization
make a good, and incentives for boundaries using
Culture and Diversity
• Diversity among members of the groups not just in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and
cultural background but also in attitudes, skills, personalities, and etc.
• Factors that can help groups maximize the benefits of diversity and minimize problems:
• Cultural metacognition. That is multicultural groups perform better if their members or
leaders have relatively high awareness of their own and others.
• “multicultural engagement”—that is, people adapted to and learned about new cultures—
are more likely to be successful.
• When members are open to and have a positive attitude toward learning new information
Conflict: • Mixed Motives and Social Dilemmas - Having
mixed-motive is everywhere, such as when you are

Cooperation confused on whether to cooperate with others in your

group or to pursue your self-interests, which can hurt

and others.
Social Dilemma. The notion that the pursuit of self-

Competition interest can sometimes be self-destructive.

▪ Types of social dilemma:
Within and • Prisoner’s Dilemma - A type of dilemma in which
one party must make either cooperative or competitive
Between moves in relation to another party.
• Resource Dilemma - concern how two or more
Groups people share a limited resource.
Responding to Social Dilemmas: Groups
and Individuals
Factors in determining reactions to these dilemmas
➢ Fear and greed o the fear of being exploited by others o the greedy desire to
maximize one’s own outcomes
➢ Trust, therefore, is essential in promoting cooperation because it reduces the fear
of being exploited.
➢ A sense of belongingness and identity with the greater group also promotes
cooperation, in part because this perspective can reduce fear and greed.
Negotiation
• One type of resolving social dilemmas is through negotiation. However, oftentimes, both sides can
have the opportunity to reach an integrative agreement, in which both parties obtain outcomes that
are superior to a 50–50 split.
For example, the tale of the two sisters and the orange (Follett, 1942; Kassin, Fein and Markus,
2017):
“One sister wanted the juice to drink; the other wanted the peel for a cake. So they sliced the
orange in half and each one took her portion. These sisters suffered from an advanced case of what
is known as the fixed-pie syndrome, the belief that whatever one of them won, the other one lost. In
fact, however, each of them could have had the whole thing: all of the juice for one, all of the peel for
the other. An integrative agreement was well within their grasp, but they failed to see it.
Unfortunately, research indicates that this happens all too often.
Culture and Negotiation
• The ability to negotiate effectively across cultures becomes
increasingly important. When it comes to negotiation, considering and
understanding cultural differences is vital.
• The higher the cultural intelligence a person has, the more he will
likely succeed in cross-cultural negotiations.
 • One way to establish common
ground between groups in conflict is

Finding through the recognition of a

superordinate identity. When group

Common members perceive that they have a

shared identity across group
boundaries, the attractiveness of
Ground outgroup members increases, and
interactions between the groups often
become more peaceful
Thank you