People in Groups Flashcards
(35 cards)
Name the three usual group characteristics.
Common bond vs common identity.
Aggregates (emotional, common opinion) vs groups.
Individual (additive nature, individual by individual) vs collectivist stance.
Explain the difference between a common bond and a common identity.
Common bond - focused on individual relationships. Egocentric.
Common identity - focussed on the whole group. Altruistic.
Example: women are usually more focussed on common bond and men common identity (not generalisable to all groups!).
Define entitativity.
This is a property of a group that makes it seem like a coherent, distinct and unitary structure.
Name a group with high entitativity and one with low entitativity.
High: family.
Low: gender, race.
Define cohesiveness.
This is a property of a group that binds people and gives them meaning.
Name 3 things that can improve cohesiveness.
Attraction, similarity and cooperation.
What is social facilitation (Triplett, 1898)?
The tendency for people to be aroused into better performance on simple tasks when others are present.
What is social inhibition?
Where people perform worst on tasks when others are present.
What did Zajonc believe drive theory was due to?
Biological tendency.
Briefly explain Zajonc’s drive theory.
The present of others leads to arousal which increase in performing dominant responses.
If the dominant responses are correct, social facilitation occurs.
If the dominant responses are incorrect, social inhibition occurs.
What was the evaluation apprehension theory (Cottrell, 1968)?
Cottrell manipulated the audience (blindfolded, merely present, attentive audience).
Results showed that an attentive audience led to the most facilitation.
What is a critique of the evaluation apprehension theory?
Later studies found no difference between audience conditions.
A person merely being there changed performance.
Briefly explain the distraction-conflict theory.
The presence of others creates attentional conflict between attention to others versus attention to task.
If the task is well learnt then performance increases.
What did Ringelmann (1913) observe about the efficiency of people (Ringelmann effect)?
As group size increases, individual effort on a task decreases.
What were the two explanations for the Ringelmann effect?
Coordination loss.
Motivation loss.
How did Ingham, Levinger, Graves and Peckham (1974) build on the original Ringelmann study?
Discovered that the Ringelmann effect was due to loss of motivation (pulling ropes study).
Define social loafing.
A reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task compared with working either alone or co-actively.
What did Latane, Williams and Harkins (1979)’s study show and why did this occur?
That as group size increased, noise produced by each participant decreased accordingly.
This is because as new member numbers increase, the group decreases in terms of significance of impact on effort.
The impact stops at 8 people.
What is the free-rider effect?
A free-rider is someone who exploits a shared public resource without contributing to its maintenance.
What is the key difference between the free-rider effect and social loafing effect?
Free-riders take advantage of the group product without contributing. Loafers reduce effort but still contribute.
What are the three main reasons why people loaf?
Output equity: they think others loaf too.
Evaluative apprehension: presence of others leads to a sense of anonymity for those not motivated to do the task.
Matching to standard: They have no clear performance to match.
Name five things that can reduce social loafing.
Task attractiveness + importance.
Collectivistic cultures.
Presence of an outgroup (competition).
Salient group identity (e.g. uniform).
What is the self-categorisation theory?
Salient social identity leads to self-stereotyping by which the self is perceived as interchangeable with other ingroup members (depersonalisation). Group behaviour is associated with change in the structure of the self.
Briefly explain the relationship between personal and social attraction (Hogg & Hardie, 1991).
Social attraction means prototypically + norms is important for identifiers.
As social identification increases, social attraction becomes more important.
