GROUP DYNAMICS 2

Ms W. Nalungwe/JM. Ncheka
 OVERVIEW
• Social influence
• Group influence
• Attitudes
– Components of attitude
– Attitude formation
– Attitude change
• Self Study
– Prejudice and Discrimination
 Social Influence
• How people are influenced in social settings.
– How we present ourselves to others to influence
their perception of us
– How we change other people’s behaviour and
attitudes

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 Aspects of Social Influence
• Conformity and Obedience
– Research on this started after world war II
– Psychologists tried to find answers to some of the
behaviours seen in the war e.g. Holocaust
– How extensively people will change behaviour to
coincide with what others are doing.
– How readily people obey someone in authority

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 Conformity
• Conformity is a change in a person’s
behaviour to coincide more closely with a
group standard.
– Cut hair short because it is in fashion.
• In conformity, people sometimes act against
better judgment in order to conform.
• Is conformity bad?

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• Imagine how chaotic it would be if people did
not conform to social norms?

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• e.g. social norms:
– Stopping at red lights
– Driving on the correct side of the road
– Attending classes regularly

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Factors that contribute to Conformity
• Cialdini and Trost, 1998
• Normative social influence
– Influence to conform that other people have on us
because we seek approval/avoid disapproval.
• Wearing particular kind of clothes
• Adopt a particular hairstyle
• Adopt certain set of attitudes

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• Informational social influence
– People conform because they want to be right.
– Two factors involved:
• How confident we are in our own judgement .
• How well informed we perceive the group to be.
• e.g. Choice of phone or computer

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 Obedience
• Obedience is behaviour that complies with the
demands of the individual in authority.
• We are obedient when an authority figure
demands that we do something and we do it.

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 Group Influence
• How does group performance compare with
individual performance?
• How do people in groups interact and make
decisions?

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• Presence of others can either:
– Enhance our performance
– Cause performance decline

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• Performance is influenced by the presence of
others:
– Social facilitation
– Social loafing
– Deindividualisation

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 Social facilitation
• Presence of others improves one’s
perfomance.
• Presence of others arouse us
• The arousal produces energy and facilitates
one’s performance in groups.

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• Improves performance on already learnt
tasks.
– Better on simple tasks
– Worse on complex tasks

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• This will be explained using the Zanjonc’s
Mere Presence Theory which states that all
animals are aroused by the presence of
others.
• Three factors are involved:
– Arousal
– Dorminant response
– Task difficulty

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• Evaluation apprehension
– Worrying about other’s opinion
• Distraction conflict theory
– Conflict between task and distraction

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 Social loafing
• Refers to each persons tendency to exert less
effort in a group because of reduced
accountability for individual effort.
• Common when an individual knows when will
not be detected.
• Individual output declines on group tasks.
– e.g. a group of students assigned a project.

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• Social loafing can be reduced by:
– Increase identifiability
– Uniqueness of individual contributions
– Make task attractive

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 Deindividuation
• Occurs in groups where there is reduced
personal identity and erodes personal
responsibility.
• Groups give us anonymity
– Individuals may act in a disinhibited way knowing
they will not be identified.

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 Attitudes
• We have attitudes about many different
aspects of our environment such as:
– Groups of people
– Places.
– Capital punishment
– Abortion
– Mental illness

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 DEFINITIONS
• Frank Barron (1953): “Attitudes are lasting
evaluations of various aspects of the social
world; evaluations that are stored in memory.”

• Travers (2018): An attitude is a readiness to

respond in such a way that behaviour is given
a certain direction.
• Whittaker (2016): An attitude is a
predisposition or readiness to respond in a
predetermined manner to relevant stimuli.
 WORKING DEFINITION
• Attitude refers to the tendency to think, act or
feel consistently in a favourable or
unfavourable manner towards entities in our
environment.

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 Features of Attitudes
• Attitudes are learnt.
– Acquired from significant others
– Reflect cultural biases.
• Attitudes are evaluative.
– It involves subjective judgements.
• Which seems to be inherent.
• Automatic/instantaneous .

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• Attitudes tend to be relatively persistent.
– Remain consistent over time.
– Attitudes are stable (although they can be
changed).
COMPONENTS OF ATTITUDES
• It has three main components called the ABC of
attitude:
– Affective component
• Feelings towards a particular stimuli
– Behavioural component
• Way of behaving or action towards a particular
stimuli.
– Cognitive component
• Beliefs, knowledge and information about a
particular stimuli.

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 How do attitudes develop?

•There are a number of factors that can

influence how and why attitudes develop.
1. Experience
•Attitudes form directly as a result of experience.
•They may emerge due to direct personal experience, or
they may result from observation.
2. Social Factors
•Social roles and social norms can have a strong influence
on attitudes.
•Social roles relate to how people are expected to behave
in a particular role or context.
•Social norms involve society's rules for what behaviours
are considered appropriate.
3. Learning
•Attitudes can be learned in a variety of ways.
•Consider how advertisers use classical
conditioning to influence your attitude toward a
particular product.
•In a television commercial, you see young,
beautiful people having fun on a tropical beach
while enjoying a sports drink.
• This attractive and appealing imagery causes
you to develop a positive association with this
particular beverage.
• Operant conditioning can also be used to
influence how attitudes develop.
Example:
• Imagine a young man who has just started
smoking.
• Whenever he lights up a cigarette, people
complain and ask him to leave their vicinity.
• This negative feedback from those around him
eventually causes him to develop an
unfavourable opinion of smoking and he decides
to give up the habit.
4. Observation
•People also learn attitudes by observing people
around them. When someone you admire
greatly, favours and portrays a particular
attitude, you are more likely to develop the
same beliefs.
•For example, children spend a great deal of
time observing the attitudes of their parents and
usually begin to demonstrate similar outlooks.
 Attitude change to match
behaviour
• In some cases, people may actually change
their attitudes in order to better align them
with their behaviour.
• Cognitive dissonance is a phenomenon in
which a person experiences psychological
distress due to conflicting thoughts or beliefs.
• In order to reduce this tension, people may
change their attitudes to reflect their other
beliefs or actual behaviours.
• Cognitive dissonance describes the discomfort
experienced by an individual when two
cognitions are incompatible with each other a
cognition is a piece of knowledge such as , a
thought, an attitude, a personal value or a
behaviour.
• This incompatibility can occur when an
individual does something that is against a
value that is important to them.
• This can cause distress in the individual.
Self Study
PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION

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What do you think of these women?
 Prejudice
• Prejudice is defined as:
– An attitude (usually negative) towards members
of some group, based solely on their membership
in that group.
– Prejudice is negative attitude directed towards
people simply because they are members of a
specific social group.

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• Prejudice like any other attitude has three
components:
– Affective (prejudice)
– Behavioural (discrimination)
– Cognitive (stereotyping)

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• Historically, prejudice has had grave
consequence:
– Ethnic cleansing
– Genocide
• Recently xenophobia.
• We acquire prejudice early in life, even before
we meet those against whom the prejudices
are held.

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• Discrimination is:
– A negative action towards a member of a
member of a specific social group.
– A negative action (e.g. aggression, segregation,
exclusion) directed at the members of a minority
group.

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• Stereotyping
– It is the attribution to a person’s characteristics or
traits, which are assumed to be typical of the
group to which the individual belongs.
– Tendency to place a person in a categories
according to some easily and quickly identifiable
characteristics (age, gender, occupation,
ethnicity).

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• Stereotype is part of the thinking process and
helps in:
• Categorising information
• Simplifying information
• Use information with ease/shorthand way
• Stereotypes are social schemas:
– Simplified representations
– Expectations and beliefs

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• e.g. of typical stereotypes
– Blacks are inferior to whites
– Homosexuals are sick people
– Women are weak and inferior to men
• Often stereotypes are based on minimal
information based on second or third hand
information (TV, radio, newspaper).
• Stereotypes are resistant to change and
persist in spite of evidence to the contrary.
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 Reducing Prejudice
• Equal status within the situation.
• Strive to achieve common goals.
• Intergroup cooperation.
• Support of authorities, law/customs.
• Friendship potential.

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• How are you going to use this information in
your practice as medical practitioners?

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Summary

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