Groups keywords

• Common bond group: face to face and bonded personally
• common identity group: grouped as category
• entitativity = extent of coherency. Members:
  1. interact a lot
  2. value the group
  3. share common goals
  4. are similar
  5. They
     • share resources,
     • reciprocate,
     • recognize authority
     • and adhere to group norms

Hierarchies in groups

4 aspects:

1. Status: lower status people are more conformist
2. roles: assigned or acquired and linked to self-concept. For people to take on their roles they must first do both:
   1. internalization
   2. role identification
3. Norms: rules of conduct
   • Individualistic subcultures tolerate dissent.
   • Collectivistic subcultures do not.
4. Cohesiveness:
   • liking
   • similarity
   • common goals
   • shared identity
   • Cohesive groups have a sense of solidarity, homogeneity, cooperation and support

Benefits / costs of groups

High status groups offer self enhancement

Groups that involve painful or difficult effort to join, such as a difficult initiation ritual will be more liked and more difficult to leave.

Groups splinter because they are too costly in time, energy etc, too restrictive, or adopt policies that members disapprove of. Or when people no longer identify with the group.

Effects of others

Being around other people increases arousal. Which increases performance of dominant (habituated) responses. So if you are already good at something, you will do it well.

But if you are not good at something, performance will be worse. Being watched – evaluation apprehension – can make performance worse.

distraction-conflict theory: paying attention to the audience takes cognitive energy and therefore causes arousal.

Social loafing: more in larger groups. feeling dispensable, or experiencing unfairness increases social loafing

Crowds

crowds can be hooliganistic because of

• deindividuation
• reduced self-awareness
• anonymity
• antisocial norms

Cooperation and conflict

cooperation requires trust

Conflicts can be caused by:

• incompatible interests
• faulty attributions
• faulty communications, especially involving destructive criticism
• Thinking the others are biased, and self is objective (often thought by dominant people in the group)
• poor performance

Can be resolved by bargaining, joint benefits, preventing loss of face, and superordinate goals

Social dilemmas: putting self or the group first

Punishing people for lack of cooperation increases short term cooperation but replaces trust with self-interest. Trust is key!

Fairness

1. Distributive Justice/equity in distribution of rewards
2. Procedural Justice
3. Transactional/interactional justice. Fair reasons give sensitively for rewards

Unfairness

People disinvest when they perceive distributive unfairness, to equalize investments and outcomes.

Unfairness can also lead to theft, sabotage or workplace aggression

Decision-making

group polarization: Groups can take more extreme decisions than individuals, and get more extreme over time. Caused by:

• social comparison
• arguments favor groups initial preference and then strengthen the position, which becomes majority position
• more so in larger groups

recidivism: individuals go back to their own opinions after they leave the group

Groupthink: everyone agrees and ignores contrary information. So they become inaccurate and make bad decisions

Only information that is shared already gets shared in the group. So new information from the members is not shared.

For brainstorming new ideas to work, you need to encourage:

1. dissent
2. debate,
3. competitiveness
4. and low evaluation apprehension.