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Group Influence

CHAPTER 8

©Peter Muller/Image Source

What is a group?

Social facilitation: How are we affected by the presence of others?

Social loafing: Do individuals exert less effort in a group?

Deindividuation: When do people lose their sense of self in groups?

Group polarization: Do groups intensify our opinions?

Groupthink: Do groups hinder or assist good decisions?

The influence of the minority: How do individuals influence the group?

Postscript: Are groups bad for us?

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”

—Attributed to anthropologist Margaret Mead

We live in groups. Our world contains not only 7.5 billion individuals, but also 195 countries and hundreds of millions of other formal and informal groups—couples having dinner, roommates hanging out, business teams plotting strategy. How do such groups influence us? And how do individuals influence groups?

We will examine several intriguing phenomena of group influence. But first things first: What is a group and why do groups exist?

WHAT IS A GROUP?

Define group.

The answer to this question seems self-evident—until several people compare their definitions. Are jogging partners a group? Are airplane passengers a group? Is a group those who identify with one another, who sense they belong together? Is a group those who share

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common goals and rely on one another? Does a group form when individuals become organized? When their relationships with one another continue over time? These are among the social psychological definitions of a group (McGrath, 1984).

Group dynamics expert Marvin Shaw (1981) argued that all groups have one thing in common: Their members interact. Therefore, he defines a

group as two or more people who interact and who influence one another. A pair of jogging companions, then, would indeed constitute a group.

Different groups help us meet different human needs—to affiliate (to belong to and connect with others), to achieve, and to gain a social identity (Johnson et al., 2006). Unlike the great apes, we humans are “the cooperative animal”—“the ultra-social animal” (Tomasello, 2014). From our early ancestors to the present, we have intentionally collaborated to forage and hunt.

By Shaw’s definition, students working individually in a computer room would not be a group. Although physically together, they are more a collection of individuals than an interacting group (though each may be part of a group with dispersed others in an online chat room). The distinction between unrelated individuals in a computer lab and interacting individuals sometimes blurs. People who are merely in one another’s presence do sometimes, as we will see, influence one another. And at a football game, we may perceive ourselves as “us” fans in contrast with “them”—the opposing fans.

Given what you’ve just learned, do you think this is a group? What questions could you ask to find out?©Hill Street Studios/Tobin Rogers/Blend Images

In this chapter, we consider three effects of others’ mere presence: social facilitation, social loafing, and deindividuation. These three phenomena can occur with minimal interaction (in “minimal group situations”). Then we consider three examples of social influence in interacting groups: group polarization, groupthink, and minority influence.

SUMMING UP: What Is a Group?

A group exists when two or more people interact for more than a few moments, affect one another in some way, and think of themselves as “us.”

SOCIAL FACILITATION: HOW ARE WE AFFECTED BY THE PRESENCE OF OTHERS?

Describe how we are affected by the mere presence of another person—by people who are merely present as a passive audience or as co-actors.

The Mere Presence of Others

More than a century ago, Norman Triplett (1898), a psychologist interested in bicycle racing, noticed that cyclists’ times were faster when they raced together than when each raced alone against the clock. Before he peddled his hunch (that others’ presence boosts

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performance), Triplett conducted one of social psychology’s first laboratory experiments. Children told to wind string on a fishing reel as rapidly as possible wound faster when they worked with competing co-actors than when they worked alone. “The bodily presence of another contestant . . . serves to liberate latent energy,” concluded Triplett.

A modern reanalysis of Triplett’s data revealed that the difference did not reach statistical significance (Stroebe, 2012; Strube, 2005). But ensuing experiments did find that others’ presence led people to do simple multiplication problems and cross out designated letters faster. It also improves accuracy on simple motor tasks, such as keeping a metal stick in contact with a dime-sized disk on a moving turntable (F. H. Allport, 1920; Dashiell, 1930; Travis, 1925). This

social facilitation effect also occurs with animals. In the presence of others of their species, ants excavate more sand, chickens eat more grain, and sexually active rat pairs mate more often (Bayer, 1929; Chen, 1937; Larsson, 1956).

But wait: On other tasks, the presence of others instead hinders performance. Cockroaches, parakeets, and green finches learn mazes more slowly when in the presence of others (Allee & Masure, 1936; Gates & Allee, 1933; Klopfer, 1958). This disruptive effect also occurs with people. Others’ presence diminishes efficiency at learning nonsense syllables, completing a maze, and performing complex multiplication problems (Dashiell, 1930; Pessin, 1933; Pessin & Husband, 1933). Social facilitation: Do you ride faster when bicycling with others?©Tetra Images - Shawn O’Connor/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images

Saying that others’ presence sometimes facilitates performance and sometimes hinders it is about as satisfying as the typical Scottish weather forecast—predicting that it might be sunny but then again it might rain. By 1940, social facilitation research ground to a halt, and it lay dormant for 25 years until awakened by the touch of a new idea.

Social psychologist Robert Zajonc (1923–2008, pronounced Zy-ence, rhymes with science) wondered whether these seemingly contradictory findings could be reconciled. As often happens at creative moments in science, Zajonc (1965) used one field of research to illuminate another. The illumination came from a well-established experimental psychology principle: Arousal enhances whatever response tendency is dominant. Increased arousal enhances performance on easy tasks for which the most likely—“dominant”—response is correct. People solve easy anagrams, such as akec, fastest when aroused. On complex tasks, for which the correct answer is not dominant, increased arousal promotes incorrect responding. On more difficult anagrams, such as theloacco, people do worse when aroused.

Could this principle solve the mystery of social facilitation? It seemed reasonable to assume that others’ presence will arouse or energize people (Mullen et al., 1997); most of us can recall feeling tense or excited in front of an audience. If social arousal facilitates dominant responses, it should boost performance on easy tasks and hurt performance on difficult tasks.

With that explanation, the confusing results made sense. Winding fishing reels, doing simple multiplication problems, and eating were all easy tasks, with well-learned or naturally dominant responses. Sure enough, having others around boosted performance.

Learning new material, doing a maze, and solving complex math problems were more difficult tasks with initially less probable correct responses. In these cases, the presence of others increased the number of incorrect responses on these tasks.

So, the same general rule—arousal facilitates dominant responses—worked in both cases (Figure 1). Suddenly, what had looked like contradictory results no longer seemed contradictory.

FIGURE 1The Effects of Social ArousalRobert Zajonc reconciled apparently conflicting findings by proposing that arousal from others’ presence strengthens dominant responses (the correct responses only on easy or well-learned tasks).

“Mere social contact begets . . . a stimulation of the animal spirits that heightens the efficiency of each individual workman.”

—Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

Zajonc’s solution, so simple and elegant, left other social psychologists thinking what Thomas H. Huxley thought after first reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” It seemed obvious—once Zajonc had pointed

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it out. Perhaps, however, the pieces fit so neatly only through the spectacles of hindsight. Would the solution survive direct experimental tests?

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody had thought.”

—Albert von Szent-Györgyi, The Scientist Speculates, 1962

After almost 300 studies of more than 25,000 people, the solution has survived (Bond & Titus, 1983; Guerin, 1993, 1999). Social arousal facilitates dominant responses, whether right or wrong. For example, Peter Hunt and Joseph Hillery (1973) found that in others’ presence, students took less time to learn a simple maze and more time to learn a complex one (just as the cockroaches did!). And James Michaels and collaborators (1982) found that good pool players in a student union (who had made 71% of their shots while being unobtrusively observed) did even better (80% when four observers came up to watch them play). Poor shooters (who had previously averaged 36%) did even worse (25%) when closely observed.

Eating is a simple, natural behavior. And have you noticed that you tend to scarf more food when eating with a group? At a party, do you sometimes overeat? If so, you are not alone—as research from diary studies, observational studies, and experimental studies confirms (Herman, 2015, 2017). When sharing an eating pleasure—tasting chocolates—people find the treat more enjoyable and flavorful (Boothby et al., 2014, 2016).

Athletes, actors, and musicians perform well-practiced skills, which helps explain why they often perform best when energized by the responses of a supportive audience. Studies of more than a quarter million college and professional athletic events worldwide reveal that home teams win approximately 6 in 10 games, with the home advantage larger for teamwork-focused sports (Jones, 2015) (Table 1). The home advantage is amazingly constant over time and across sports. NBA basketball teams, NHL hockey teams, and international soccer football league teams have won more home games every year, without exception (Moskowitz & Wertheim, 2011).

TABLE 1 Home Advantage in Major Team Sports

Source: Jeremy Jamieson (2010).

Social facilitation—a home audience energizing performance on well-learned skills—is an obvious explanation of the home advantage. Indeed, British soccer players’ stress-hormone levels (indicating arousal) are greater after home than away matches (Fothergill et al., 2017).

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Can you imagine other possible contributing factors? Mark Allen and Marc Jones (2014) include these possibilities:

Officiating bias: In one analysis of 1,530 German soccer football matches, referees awarded an average 1.80 yellow cards to home teams and 2.35 to away teams (Unkelbach & Memmert, 2010).

Travel fatigue: When flying to the East coast, West coast NFL football teams do better in night games than when playing 1 p.m. games.

Familiarity with the home context, which, depending on the locale, may include cold, rain, or high altitude.

Home-team crowd noise disruption may disrupt visiting players’ hearing plays or shooting free throws.

Crowding: The Presence of Many Others

The effect of others’ presence increases with their number (Jackson & Latané, 1981; Knowles, 1983). Sometimes the arousal and self-conscious attention created by a large audience interferes even with well-learned, automatic behaviors, such as speaking. Given extreme pressure, we’re vulnerable to “choking.” Stutterers tend to stutter more in front of larger audiences than when speaking to just one or two people (Mullen, 1986b). Over 28 years of major tournaments, professional golfers’ scores have tended to be worse in the final day’s round than on the previous day, especially so for golfers close to the tournament lead (Wells & Skowronski, 2012).

A good house is a full house, as James Maas’s Cornell University introductory psychology students experienced in this 2000-seat auditorium. If the class had 100 students meeting in this large space, it would feel much less energized.©Mike Okoniewski

Being in a crowd also intensifies positive or negative reactions. When they sit close together, friendly people are liked even more, and unfriendly people are disliked even more (Schiffenbauer & Schiavo, 1976; Storms & Thomas, 1977). In experiments with Columbia University students and with Ontario Science Center visitors, Jonathan Freedman and co-workers (1979, 1980) had people listen to a humorous tape or watch a movie with other participants. When they all sat close together, an accomplice could more readily induce the individuals to laugh and clap. As theater directors and sports fans know, and as researchers have confirmed, a “good house” is a full house (Aiello et al., 1983; Worchel & Brown, 1984). As recent experiments confirm, fun shared with others is more energizing—and fun (Reis et al., 2017).

Perhaps you’ve noticed that a class of 35 students feels more warm and lively in a room that seats just 35 than when spread around a room that seats 100. When others are close by, we are more likely to notice and join in their laughter or clapping. But crowding also enhances arousal, as Gary Evans (1979) found. He tested 10-person groups of University of Massachusetts students, either in a room 20 by 30 feet or in one 8 by 12 feet. Compared with those in the large room, those densely packed had higher pulse rates and blood pressure (indicating arousal). On difficult tasks they made more errors, an effect of crowding replicated by Dinesh Nagar and Janak Pandey (1987) with university students in India. Crowding, then, has a similar effect to being observed by a crowd: it enhances arousal, which facilitates dominant responses.

Heightened arousal in crowded homes also tends to increase stress. Crowding produces less distress in homes divided into many spaces, however, enabling people to withdraw in privacy (Evans et al., 1996, 2000).

Why Are We Aroused in the Presence of Others?

What you do well, you will be energized to do best in front of others (unless you become hyperaroused and self-conscious and choke). What you find difficult may seem impossible

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in the same circumstances. What is it about other people that creates arousal? Evidence supports three possible factors (Aiello & Douthitt, 2001; Feinberg & Aiello, 2006): evaluation apprehension, distraction, and mere presence.

A large, engaged crowd audience can be highly arousing—energizing well-learned behaviors, but sometimes creating self-conscious choking.©Lynne Powe

EVALUATION APPREHENSION

Nickolas Cottrell surmised that observers make us apprehensive because we wonder how they are evaluating us. To test whether

evaluation apprehension exists, Cottrell and associates (1968) blindfolded observers, supposedly in preparation for a perception experiment. In contrast to the effect of a watching audience, the mere presence of these blindfolded people did not boost a performer’s well-practiced responses.

Other experiments confirmed that the enhancement of dominant responses is strongest when people think they are being evaluated. In one experiment, individuals running on a jogging path sped up as they came upon a woman seated on the grass—if she was facing them rather than sitting with her back turned (Worringham & Messick, 1983).

The self-consciousness we feel when being evaluated can also interfere with behaviors that we perform best automatically (Mullen & Baumeister, 1987). If self-conscious basketball players analyze their body movements while shooting critical free throws, they are more likely to miss. We perform some well-learned behaviors best without overthinking them.

DRIVEN BY DISTRACTION

Glenn Sanders, Robert Baron, and Danny Moore (1978; Baron, 1986) carried evaluation apprehension a step further. They theorized that when we wonder how co-actors are doing or how an audience is reacting, we become distracted. This conflict between paying attention to others and paying attention to the task overloads our cognitive system, causing arousal. We are “driven by distraction.” This arousal comes not just from the presence of another person but also from other distractions, such as bursts of light (Sanders, 1981a,b).

MERE PRESENCE

Zajonc, however, believed that the mere presence of others produces some arousal even without evaluation apprehension or arousing distraction. Recall that facilitation effects also occur with nonhuman animals. This hints at an innate social arousal mechanism common to much of the zoological world. (Animals probably are not consciously worrying about how other animals are evaluating them.) At the human level, most runners are energized when running with someone else, even one who neither competes nor evaluates. University rowing team members, perhaps aided by an endorphin boost from the communal activity, tolerate twice as much pain after rowing together than when rowing solo (Cohen et al., 2009).

This is a good time to remind ourselves that a good theory is a scientific shorthand: It simplifies and summarizes a variety of observations. Social facilitation theory does this well. It is a simple summary of many research findings. A good theory also offers clear predictions that (1) help confirm or modify the theory, (2) guide new exploration, and (3) suggest practical applications. Social facilitation theory has definitely generated the first two types of prediction: (1) Its basic idea (that the presence of others is arousing, and that this arousal enhances dominant responses) has been confirmed, and (2) the theory brought new life to a long-dormant field of research.

Are there (3) some practical applications? We can make some educated guesses. Many new office buildings have replaced private offices with large, open areas. Might the resulting awareness of others’ presence help boost the performance of well-learned tasks but disrupt creative thinking on complex tasks? Can you think of other possible applications? In the “open-office plan,” people work in the presence of others. Office environments increasingly provide their workers with “collaborative spaces” (Arieff, 2011).©stockbroker/123RF

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SUMMING UP: Social Facilitation: How Are We Affected by the Presence of Others?

Social psychology’s most elementary issue concerns the mere presence of others. Some early experiments on this question found that performance improved with observers or co-actors present. Others found that the presence of others can hurt performance. Robert Zajonc reconciled those findings by applying a well-known principle from experimental psychology: Arousal facilitates dominant responses. Because the presence of others is arousing, the presence of observers or co-actors boosts performance on easy tasks (for which the correct response is dominant) and hinders performance on difficult tasks (for which incorrect responses are dominant).

Being in a crowd, or in crowded conditions, is similarly arousing and facilitates dominant responses. That helps explain the home-field advantage in sports.

But why are we aroused by others’ presence? Experiments suggest that the arousal stems partly from evaluation apprehension and partly from distraction—a conflict between paying attention to others and concentrating on the task. Other experiments, including some with animals, suggest that the presence of others can be arousing even when we are not evaluated or distracted.

SOCIAL LOAFING: DO INDIVIDUALS EXERT LESS EFFORT IN A GROUP?

Assess the level of individual effort we can expect from members of work groups. In a team tug-of-war, will eight people on a side exert as much force as the sum of their best efforts in individual tugs-of-war? If not, why not?

Social facilitation usually occurs when people work toward individual goals and when their efforts, whether winding fishing reels or solving math problems, can be individually evaluated. These situations parallel some everyday work situations. But what happens when people pool their efforts toward a common goal and individuals are not accountable for their efforts? A team tug-of-war provides one such example. Organizational fundraising—using candy sale proceeds to pay for the class trip—provides another. So does a class group project on which all students get the same grade. On such “additive tasks”—tasks where the

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group’s achievement depends on the sum of the individual efforts—will team spirit boost productivity? Will bricklayers lay bricks faster when working as a team than when working alone? Laboratory simulations provide answers.

Many Hands Make Light Work

Nearly a century ago, French engineer Max Ringelmann (reported by Kravitz & Martin, 1986) found that the collective effort of tug-of-war teams was but half the sum of the individual efforts. Contrary to the presumption that “in unity there is strength,” this suggested that group members may actually be less motivated when performing additive tasks. Maybe, though, poor performance stemmed from poor coordination—people pulling a rope in slightly different directions at slightly different times. A group of Massachusetts researchers led by Alan Ingham (1974) cleverly eliminated that problem by making individuals think others were pulling with them, when, actually, they were pulling alone. Blindfolded participants were assigned the first position in the apparatus shown in Figure 2 and told, “Pull as hard as you can.” They pulled 18% harder when they knew they were pulling alone than when they believed people behind them were also pulling.

FIGURE 2The Rope-Pulling ApparatusPeople in the first position pulled less hard when they thought people behind them were also pulling.Source: Alan G. Ingham

Researchers Bibb Latané, Kipling Williams, and Stephen Harkins (1979; Harkins et al., 1980) kept their ears open for other ways to investigate this diminished effort, which they labeled

social loafing. They observed that the noise produced by six people shouting or clapping “as loud as you can” was less than three times that produced by one person alone. Like the tug-of-war task, however, noisemaking is vulnerable to group inefficiency. So Latané and associates followed Ingham’s example by leading their Ohio State University participants to believe others were shouting or clapping with them, when in fact they were doing so alone.

Their clever method was to blindfold six people, seat them in a semicircle, and have them put on headphones, over which they were blasted with noise. People could not hear their own shouting or clapping, much less that of others in the semicircle. On various trials they were instructed to shout or clap either alone or along with the group. People who were told about this experiment guessed the participants would shout louder when with others, because they would be less inhibited (Harkins & Petty, 1982). The actual result? Social loafing: When the participants believed five others were also either shouting or clapping, they produced one-third less noise than when they thought themselves alone. Social loafing occurred even when the participants were high school cheerleaders who believed themselves to be cheering together rather than alone (Hardy & Latané, 1986).

Curiously, those who clapped both alone and in groups did not view themselves as loafing; they perceived themselves as clapping equally in both situations. This parallels what happens when students work on group projects for a shared grade. Williams reports that all agree loafing occurs—but no one admits to doing the loafing.

Due to social loafing, people make less noise clapping and shouting when in a crowd than when alone.©Ingram Publishing/SuperStock Political scientist John Sweeney (1973) observed social loafing in a cycling experiment. University of Texas students pumped exercise bicycles more energetically (as measured by electrical output) when they knew they were being individually monitored than when they thought their output was being pooled with that of other riders. In the group condition, people were tempted to

free-ride on the group effort.

In this and 160 other studies (Karau & Williams, 1993; Figure 3), we see a twist on one of the psychological forces that makes for social facilitation: evaluation apprehension. In the social loafing experiments, individuals believed they were evaluated only when they acted alone. The group situation (rope pulling, shouting, and so forth) decreased evaluation apprehension. When people are not accountable and cannot evaluate their own efforts, responsibility is diffused across all group members (Harkins & Jackson, 1985; Kerr & Bruun, 1981). By contrast, the social facilitation experiments increased exposure to evaluation. When made the center of attention, people self-consciously monitor their behavior (Mullen & Baumeister, 1987). So, when being observed increases evaluation concerns, social facilitation occurs; when being lost in a crowd decreases evaluation concerns, social loafing occurs (Figure 4).

FIGURE 3Effort Decreases as Group Size IncreasesA statistical digest of 49 studies, involving more than 4000 participants, revealed that effort decreases (loafing increases) as the size of the group increases. Each dot represents the aggregate data from one of these studies.Source: Williams et al., 1992.

FIGURE 4Social Facilitation or Social Loafing?When individuals cannot be evaluated or held accountable, loafing becomes more likely. An individual swimmer is evaluated on her ability to win the race. In tug-of-war, no single person on the team is held accountable, so any one member might relax or loaf.swimmers: ©imagenavi/Getty Images; tug-of-war: ©Thinkstock Images/Getty Images

To motivate group members, one strategy is to make individual performance identifiable. Some football coaches do this by filming and evaluating each player individually. Whether in a group or not, people exert more effort when their outputs are individually identifiable: University swim team members swim faster in intrasquad relay races when someone monitors and announces their individual times (Williams et al., 1989).

Social Loafing in Everyday Life

How widespread is social loafing? In the laboratory, the phenomenon occurs not only among people who are pulling ropes, cycling, shouting, and clapping but also among those who are pumping water or air, evaluating poems or editorials, producing ideas, typing, and detecting signals. Do these consistent results generalize to everyday worker productivity?

In workplace group experiments, employees have produced more when their individual performance was posted (Lount & Wilk, 2014). In one such experiment, assembly-line workers produced 16% more product when their individual output was identified, even though they knew their pay would be unaffected (Faulkner & Williams, 1996). Consider the example of workers in a pickle factory who were supposed to put only the big pickles into jars. But because the jars were then merged (and their individual work unchecked), the workers just stuffed in any size pickle. Williams, Harkins, and Latané (1981) note that research on social loafing suggests “making individual production identifiable, and raises the question: ‘How many pickles could a pickle packer pack if pickle packers were only paid for properly packed pickles?’”

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Researchers have also found evidence of social loafing in varied cultures, such as by assessing agricultural output in formerly communist countries. On their collective farms under communism, Russian peasants worked one field one day, another field the next, with little direct responsibility for any given plot. For their own use, they were given small private plots. One analysis found that the private plots occupied 1% of the agricultural land, yet produced 27% of the Soviet farm output (H. Smith, 1976). In communist Hungary, private plots accounted for only 13% of the farmland but produced one-third of the output (Spivak, 1979). When China began allowing farmers to sell food grown in excess of that owed to the state, food production jumped 8% per year—2.5 times the annual increase in the preceding 26 years (Church, 1986). In an effort to tie rewards to productive effort, modern Russia “decollectivized” many of its farms (Kramer, 2008).

What about noncommunist collectivistic cultures? Latané and co-researchers (Gabrenya et al., 1985) repeated their sound-production experiments in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, India, and Malaysia. Their findings? Social loafing was evident in all those countries, too. Seventeen later studies in Asia reveal that people in collectivistic cultures do, however, exhibit less social loafing than do people in individualistic cultures (Karau & Williams, 1993; Kugihara, 1999). As we noted in earlier chapters, loyalty to family and work groups runs strong in collectivistic cultures. Likewise, women tend to be less individualistic than men—and to exhibit less social loafing.

Social loafing also appears in donations of money and time. In North America, workers who do not pay dues or volunteer time to their unions or professional associations nevertheless are usually happy to accept the associations’ benefits. So, too, are public radio listeners and television viewers who don’t respond to their station’s fund drives. This hints at another possible explanation of social loafing: When rewards are divided equally, regardless of how much one contributes to the group, any individual gets more reward per unit of effort by free-riding on the group. Thus, people may slack off when their efforts are not individually

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monitored and rewarded—which may also enable them to overestimate their own relative contribution (Schroeder et al., 2016). Situations that welcome free riders can therefore be, in the words of one commune member, a “paradise for parasites.”

But surely collective effort does not always lead to slacking off. Sometimes the goal is so compelling and maximum output from everyone is so essential that team spirit maintains or intensifies effort. In an Olympic crew race, will the individual rowers in an eight-person crew pull their oars with less effort than those in a one- or two-person crew?

The evidence assures us they will not. People in groups loaf less when the task is challenging, appealing, or involving (Karau & Williams, 1993; Tan & Tan, 2008). On challenging tasks, people may perceive their efforts as indispensable (Harkins & Petty, 1982; Kerr, 1983; Kerr et al., 2007). When swimming the last leg of a relay race with a medal at stake, swimmers tend to swim even faster than in individual competition (Hüffmeier et al., 2012).

Teamwork at the Charles River regatta in Boston. Social loafing occurs when people work in groups but without individual accountability—unless the task is challenging, appealing, or involving, and the group members are friends.©leezsnow/E+/Getty Images

Groups also loaf less when their members are friends or they feel identified with or indispensable to their group (Davis & Greenlees, 1992; Gockel et al., 2008; Karau & Williams, 1997; Worchel et al., 1998). Even just expecting to interact with someone again serves to increase effort on team projects (Groenenboom et al., 2001). Collaborate on a class project with others you’ll see often and you will feel more motivated than if you never expect to see them again. Cohesiveness intensifies effort.

These findings parallel those from studies of everyday work groups. When groups are given challenging objectives, when they are rewarded for group success, and when there is a spirit of commitment to the “team,” group members work hard (Hackman, 1986). Keeping work groups small can also help members believe their contributions are indispensable (Comer, 1995).

SUMMING UP: Social Loafing: Do Individuals Exert Less Effort in a Group?

Social facilitation researchers study people’s performance on tasks where they can be evaluated individually. However, in many work situations, people pool their efforts and work toward a common goal without individual accountability.

Group members often work less hard when performing such “additive tasks.” This finding parallels everyday situations in which diffused responsibility tempts individual group members to free-ride on the group’s effort.

People may, however, put forth even more effort in a group when the goal is important, rewards are significant, and team spirit exists.

DEINDIVIDUATION: WHEN DO PEOPLE LOSE THEIR SENSE OF SELF IN GROUPS?

Define “deindividuation” and identify circumstances that trigger it.

In April 2003, in the wake of American troops entering Iraq’s cities, looters—“liberated” from the scrutiny of police—ran rampant. Hospitals lost beds. The National Library lost tens of thousands of old manuscripts and lay in smoldering ruins. Universities lost computers,

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chairs, even lightbulbs. The National Museum in Baghdad lost 15,000 precious objects (Burns, 2003a, 2003b; Lawler, 2003c; Polk & Schuster, 2005). “Not since the Spanish conquistadors ravaged the Aztec and Inca cultures has so much been lost so quickly,” reported Science (Lawler, 2003a). “They came in mobs: A group of 50 would come, then would go, and another would come,” explained one university dean (Lawler, 2003b).

Such reports—and those of the 2011 arson and looting that occurred in London, the 2014 looting in Ferguson, Missouri, and the mob sexual assaults in Germany as 2016 dawned—had the rest of the world wondering: What happened to people’s sense of morality? Why did such behavior erupt? And why was it not anticipated?

Deindividuation: During England’s 2011 riots and looting, rioters were disinhibited by social arousal and by the anonymity provided by darkness and their hoods and masks. Later, some of those arrested expressed bewilderment over their own behavior.©Lewis Whyld/AP Images

Their behavior even left many of the rioters later wondering what had possessed them. In court, some of the arrested London rioters seemed bewildered by their behavior (Smith, 2011). The mother of one of them, a recent university graduate, explained that her daughter had been sobbing in her bedroom since her arrest over a stolen television. “She doesn’t even know why she took it. She doesn’t need a telly.” An engineering student, arrested after looting a supermarket while he was walking home, was said by his lawyer to having “got caught up in the moment” and was now “incredibly ashamed” (Somaiya, 2011).

Doing Together What We Would Not Do Alone

Social facilitation experiments show that groups can arouse people, and social loafing experiments show that groups can diffuse responsibility. When arousal and diffused responsibility combine, and normal inhibitions diminish, the results may be startling. People may commit acts that range from a mild lessening of restraint (throwing food in the dining hall, snarling at a referee, screaming during a rock concert) to impulsive self-gratification (group vandalism, orgies, thefts) to destructive social explosions (police brutality, riots, lynchings).

These unrestrained behaviors have something in common: They are provoked by the power of being in a group. Groups can generate a sense of excitement, of being caught up in something bigger than one’s self. It is hard to imagine a single rock fan screaming deliriously at a private rock concert, or a single rioter setting a car on fire. It’s in group situations that people are more likely to abandon normal restraints, to forget their individual identity, to become responsive to group or crowd norms—in a word, to become what Leon Festinger, Albert Pepitone, and Theodore Newcomb (1952) labeled

deindividuated. What circumstances elicit this psychological state?

GROUP SIZE

A group has the power not only to arouse its members but also to render them unidentifiable. The snarling crowd hides the snarling basketball fan. A lynch mob enables its members to believe they will not be prosecuted; they perceive the action as the group’s. Looters, made faceless by the mob, are freed to loot. One researcher analyzed 21 instances in which crowds were present as someone threatened to jump from a building or a bridge (Mann, 1981). When the crowd was small and exposed by daylight, people usually did not try to bait the person with cries of “Jump!” But when a large crowd or the cover of night gave people anonymity, the crowd usually did bait and jeer.

Lynch mobs produce a similar effect: The bigger the mob, the more its members lose self-awareness and become willing to commit atrocities, such as burning, lacerating, or dismembering the victim (Leader et al., 2007; Mullen, 1986a).

In each of these examples, from sports crowds to lynch mobs, evaluation apprehension plummets. People’s attention is focused on the situation, not on themselves. And because “everyone is doing it,” all can attribute their behavior to the situation rather than to their own choices.

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ANONYMITY

How can we be sure that crowds offer anonymity? We can’t. But we can experiment with anonymity to see if it actually lessens inhibitions. Philip Zimbardo (1970, 2002) got the idea for such an experiment from his undergraduate students, who questioned how good boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies could so suddenly become monsters after painting their faces. To experiment with such anonymity, he dressed New York University women in identical white coats and hoods, rather like Ku Klux Klan members (Figure 5). Asked to deliver electric shocks to a woman, they pressed the shock button twice as long as did women who were unconcealed and wearing large name tags. Even dimmed lighting or wearing sunglasses increases people’s perceived anonymity, and thus their willingness to cheat or behave selfishly (Zhong et al., 2010).

FIGURE 5 In Philip Zimbardo’s deindividuation research, anonymous women delivered more shock to helpless victims than did identifiable women.©Philip Zimbardo

The Internet offers similar anonymity. Millions of those who were aghast at the looting by the Baghdad mobs were on those very days anonymously pirating music tracks using file-sharing software. With so many doing it, and with so little concern about being caught, downloading someone’s copyrighted property and then offloading it to an MP3 player just didn’t seem terribly immoral. Internet bullies who would never say, “Get a life, you phony,” to someone’s face will hide behind their anonymity online. Most social media sites, to their credit, require people to use their real names, which constrains hate-filled comments.

On several occasions, anonymous online bystanders have egged on people threatening suicide, sometimes with live video feeding the scene to scores of people. Online communities “are like the crowd outside the building with the guy on the ledge,” noted one analyst of technology’s social effects (quoted by Stelter, 2008). Sometimes a caring person tried to talk the person down, while others, in effect, chanted, “Jump, jump.” “The anonymous nature of these communities only emboldens the meanness or callousness of the people on these sites.”

Testing deindividuation on the streets, Patricia Ellison, John Govern, and their colleagues (1995) had a driver stop at a red light and wait for 12 seconds whenever she was followed by a convertible or a 4 × 4 vehicle. During the wait, she recorded horn-honking (a mild aggressive act) by the car behind. Compared with drivers of convertibles and 4 × 4s with the car tops down, those who were relatively anonymous (with the tops up) honked one-third sooner, twice as often, and for nearly twice as long. Anonymity feeds incivility.

A research team led by Ed Diener (1976) cleverly demonstrated the effect both of being in a group and of being physically anonymous. At Halloween, they observed 1,352 Seattle children trick-or-treating. As the children, either alone or in groups, approached 1 of 27 homes scattered throughout the city, an experimenter greeted them warmly, invited them to “take one of the candies,” and then left the candy unattended. Hidden observers noted that children in groups were more than twice as likely to take extra candy than were solo children. Also, children who had been asked their names and where they lived were less than half as likely to transgress as those who were left anonymous. As Figure 6 shows, when they were deindividuated both by group immersion and by anonymity, most children stole extra candy.

FIGURE 6 Children were more likely to transgress by taking extra Halloween candy when in a group, when anonymous, and, especially, when deindividuated by the combination of group immersion and anonymity.Source: Data from Diener et al., 1976.

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Those studies make us wonder about the effect of wearing uniforms. Preparing for battle, warriors in some tribal cultures (like some rabid sports fans) depersonalize themselves with body and face paints or special masks. Robert Watson (1973) scrutinized anthropological files and discovered this: The cultures with depersonalized warriors were also the cultures that brutalized their enemies. In Northern Ireland, 206 of 500 violent attacks studied by Andrew Silke (2003) were conducted by attackers who wore masks, hoods, or other face disguises. Compared with undisguised attackers, these anonymous attackers inflicted more serious injuries, attacked more people, and committed more vandalism.

Does becoming physically anonymous always unleash our worst impulses? Fortunately, no. In all these situations, people were responding to clear antisocial cues. Robert Johnson and Leslie Downing (1979) point out that the Klan-like outfits worn by Zimbardo’s participants may have been stimulus cues for hostility. In an experiment at the University of Georgia, women put on nurses’ uniforms before deciding how much shock someone should receive. When those wearing the nurses’ uniforms were made anonymous, they became less aggressive in administering shocks. From their analysis of 60 deindividuation studies, Tom Postmes and Russell Spears (1998; Reicher et al., 1995) concluded that being anonymous makes one less self-conscious, more group-conscious, and more responsive to situational cues, whether negative (Klan uniforms) or positive (nurses’ uniforms).

AROUSING AND DISTRACTING ACTIVITIES

Aggressive outbursts by large groups are often preceded by minor actions that arouse and divert people’s attention. Group shouting, chanting, clapping, or dancing serve both to hype people up and to reduce self-consciousness.

Experiments have shown that activities such as throwing rocks and group singing can set the stage for more disinhibited behavior (Diener, 1976, 1979). There is a self-reinforcing pleasure in acting impulsively while seeing others do likewise. When we see others act as we are acting, we think they feel as we do, which reinforces our own feelings (Orive, 1984). Moreover, impulsive group action absorbs our attention. When we yell at the referee, we are not thinking about our values; we are reacting to the immediate situation. Later, when we stop to think about what we have done or said, we sometimes feel chagrined. Sometimes. At other times we seek deindividuating group experiences—dances, worship experiences, team sports—where we enjoy intense positive feelings and closeness to others.

“Attending a service in the Gothic cathedral, we have the sensation of being enclosed and steeped in an integral universe, and of losing a prickly sense of self in the community of worshipers.”

—Yi-Fu Tuan, Segmented Worlds and Self, 1982

Diminished Self-Awareness

Group experiences that diminish self-consciousness tend to disconnect behavior from attitudes. Research by Ed Diener (1980) and Steven Prentice-Dunn and Ronald Rogers (1980, 1989)

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revealed that unself-conscious, deindividuated people are less restrained, less self-regulated, more likely to act without thinking about their own values, and more responsive to the situation. These findings complement and reinforce the experiments on self-awareness.

Self-awareness is the opposite of deindividuation. Those made self-aware, by acting in front of a mirror or a TV camera, exhibit increased self-control, and their actions more clearly reflect their attitudes. In front of a mirror, people taste-testing cream cheese varieties ate less of the high-fat variety (Sentyrz & Bushman, 1998).

Looking in a mirror or being on camera increases self-awareness, making us think about our individual actions more carefully.©Syda Productions/Shutterstock

People made self-aware are also less likely to cheat (Beaman et al., 1979; Diener & Wallbom, 1976). So are those who generally have a strong sense of themselves as distinct and independent (Nadler et al., 1982). In Japan, where people more often imagine how they might look to others, the presence of a mirror had no effect on cheating (Heine et al., 2008). The principle: People who are self-conscious, or who are temporarily made so, exhibit greater consistency between their words outside a situation and their deeds in it.

We can apply those findings to many situations in everyday life. Circumstances that decrease self-awareness, as alcohol consumption does, increase deindividuation (Hull et al., 1983). Deindividuation decreases in circumstances that increase self-awareness: mirrors and cameras, small towns, bright lights, large name tags, undistracted quiet, individual clothes and houses (Ickes et al., 1978). When a teenager leaves for a party, a parent’s parting advice could well be “Have fun, and remember who you are.” In other words, enjoy being with the group, but be self-aware; maintain your personal identity; be wary of deindividuation.

SUMMING UP: Deindividuation: When Do People Lose Their Sense of Self in Groups?

When high levels of social arousal combine with diffused responsibility, people may abandon their normal restraints and lose their sense of individuality.

Such deindividuation is especially likely when people are in a large group, are physically anonymous, and are aroused and distracted.

The resulting diminished self-awareness and self-restraint tend to increase people’s responsiveness to the immediate situation, be it negative or positive. Deindividuation is less likely when self-awareness is high.

GROUP POLARIZATION: DO GROUPS INTENSIFY OUR OPINIONS?

Describe and explain how interaction with like-minded people tends to amplify preexisting attitudes.

Do group interactions more often have good or bad outcomes? Police brutality and mob violence demonstrate the destructive potential of groups. Yet support-group leaders, work-group consultants, and educational theorists proclaim the beneficial effects of group interaction. And self-help group members and religious adherents strengthen their identities by fellowship with like-minded others.

Studies of small groups have produced a principle that helps explain both bad and good outcomes: Group discussion often strengthens members’ initial inclinations. The unfolding

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of this research on

group polarization illustrates the process of inquiry—how an interesting discovery often leads researchers to hasty and erroneous conclusions, which get replaced with more accurate conclusions. This is a scientific mystery I [DM] can discuss firsthand, having been one of the detectives.

The Case of the “Risky Shift”

More than 300 studies began with a surprising finding by James Stoner (1961), then an MIT graduate student. For his master’s thesis in management, Stoner tested the commonly held belief that groups are more cautious than individuals. He posed decision dilemmas in which the participant’s task was to advise imagined characters how much risk to take. Put yourself in the participant’s shoes: What advice would you give the character in this situation?1

Helen is a writer who is said to have considerable creative talent but who so far has been earning a comfortable living by writing cheap westerns. Recently she has come up with an idea for a potentially significant novel. If it could be written and accepted, it might have considerable literary impact and be a big boost to her career. On the other hand, if she cannot work out her idea or if the novel is a flop, she will have expended considerable time and energy without remuneration.

Imagine that you are advising Helen. Please check the lowest probability that you would consider acceptable for Helen to attempt to write the novel.

Helen should attempt to write the novel if the chances that the novel will be a success are at least

_____ 1 in 10

_____ 2 in 10

_____ 3 in 10

_____ 4 in 10

_____ 5 in 10

_____ 6 in 10

_____ 7 in 10

_____ 8 in 10

_____ 9 in 10

_____ 10 in 10 (Place a check here if you think Helen should attempt the novel only if it is certain that the novel will be a success.)

After making your decision, guess what this book’s average reader would advise.

Having marked their advice on a dozen items, five or so individuals would then discuss and reach agreement on each item. How do you think the group decisions compared with the average decision before the discussions? Would the groups be likely to take greater risks, be more cautious, or stay the same?

To everyone’s amazement, the group decisions were usually riskier. This “risky shift phenomenon” set off a wave of group risk-taking studies. These revealed that risky shift occurs not only when a group decides by consensus; after a brief discussion, individuals, too, will alter their decisions. What is more, researchers successfully repeated Stoner’s finding with people of varying ages and occupations in a dozen nations.

The risky shift: Groups of people, like these teens in a car together, may make more risky decisions than individuals alone.©Big Cheese Photo/Superstock

During discussion, opinions converged. Curiously, however, the point toward which they converged was usually a lower (riskier) number than their initial average. Here was an intriguing puzzle. The small risky shift effect was reliable, unexpected, and without any immediately obvious explanation. What group influences produce such an effect? And how widespread is it? Do discussions in juries, business committees, and military organizations also promote risk taking? Does this explain why teenage reckless driving, as measured by death rates, nearly doubles when a 16- or 17-year-old driver has two teenage

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passengers rather than none (Chen et al., 2000)? Does it explain stock bubbles, as people discuss why stocks are rising, thus creating an informational cascade that drives stocks even higher (Sunstein, 2009)?

After several years of study, my [DM’s] colleagues and I discovered that the risky shift was not universal. We could write decision dilemmas on which people became more cautious after discussion. One of these featured “Roger,” a young married man with two school-age children and a secure but low-paying job. Roger can afford life’s necessities but few of its luxuries. He hears that the stock of a relatively unknown company may soon triple in value if its new product is favorably received or decline considerably if it does not sell. Roger has no savings. To invest in the company, he is considering selling his life insurance policy.

Can you see a general principle that predicts both the tendency to give riskier advice after discussing Helen’s situation and more cautious advice after discussing Roger’s? If you are like most people, you would advise Helen to take a greater risk than Roger, even before talking with others. It turns out there is a strong tendency for discussion to accentuate these initial leanings. Thus, groups discussing the “Roger” dilemma became more risk-averse than they were before discussion (Myers, 2010).

Do Groups Intensify Opinions?

Realizing that this group phenomenon was not a consistent shift toward increased risk, we reconceived the phenomenon as a tendency for group discussion to enhance group members’ initial leanings. Similar minds polarize. This idea led investigators to propose what French researchers Serge Moscovici and Marisa Zavalloni (1969) called group polarization: Discussion typically strengthens the average inclination of group members.

GROUP POLARIZATION EXPERIMENTS

This new view of the group-induced changes prompted experimenters to have people discuss attitude statements that most of them favored, or that most of them opposed. Would talking in groups enhance their shared initial inclinations? In groups, would risk takers take bigger risks, bigots become more hostile, and givers become more generous? That’s what the group polarization hypothesis predicts (Figure 7).

FIGURE 7Group PolarizationThe group polarization hypothesis predicts that discussion will strengthen an attitude shared by group members.

Dozens of studies confirm group polarization. Three examples:

Moscovici and Zavalloni (1969) observed that discussion enhanced French students’ initially positive attitude toward their president and negative attitude toward Americans.

Mititoshi Isozaki (1984) found that Japanese university students gave more pronounced judgments of “guilty” after discussing a traffic case. When jury members are inclined to award damages, the group award tends to exceed that preferred by the median jury member (Sunstein, 2007a).

When people believed they were watching an online video of a political speech at the same time as many other viewers (vs. with no other viewers), their judgments of the speech were more extreme (Shteynberg et al., 2016).

Markus Brauer and co-workers (2001) found that French students were more adamant in their dislike of someone after discussing their shared negative impressions with others. If some individuals dislike you, together they may dislike you more.

Another research strategy has been to pick issues on which opinions are divided and then isolate people who hold the same view. Does discussion with like-minded people strengthen shared views? Does it magnify the attitude gap that separates the two sides?

George Bishop and I [DM] wondered. So we set up groups of relatively prejudiced and unprejudiced high school students and asked them to respond—before and after discussion—to issues involving racial attitudes (Myers & Bishop, 1970).

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For example, they responded to a case involving the property right to rent only to one’s race versus the civil right to not face discrimination. We found that the discussions among like-minded students did indeed increase the initial gap between the two groups (Figure 8). Moreover, Jessica Keating and her collaborators (2016) report that people are unaware of the phenomenon in their own lives. When small groups of like-minded people discussed whether Barack Obama or George W. Bush was the better president, participants underestimated how much the discussion polarized their attitudes, misremembering their earlier attitudes as less extreme than they actually were. FIGURE 8 Discussion increased polarization between homogeneous groups of high- and low-prejudice high school students. Talking over racial issues increased prejudice in a high-prejudice group and decreased it in a low-prejudice group.Source: Data from Myers & Bishop, 1970.

Studies in Britain and Australia confirm that group discussion can magnify both negative and positive tendencies. When people share negative impressions of a group, such as an immigrant group, discussion supports their negative views and increases their willingness to discriminate (Smith & Postmes, 2011). And when people share concern about an injustice, discussion amplifies their moral concern (Thomas & McGarty, 2009). Like hot coals together, like minds strengthen one another.

GROUP POLARIZATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE

In everyday life, people associate mostly with others whose attitudes are similar to their own. (See the Attraction chapter, or just look at your own circle of friends.) So, outside the laboratory, do everyday group interactions with like-minded friends intensify shared attitudes? Do the nerds become nerdier, the jocks jockier, and the rebels more rebellious?

It happens. The self-segregation of boys into all-male groups and of girls into all-female groups increases their initially modest gender differences, noted Eleanor Maccoby (2002). Boys with boys become gradually more competitive and action oriented in their play and fictional fare. Girls with girls become more relationally oriented.

On U.S. federal appellate court cases, judges appointed by Republican presidents tend to vote like Republicans and judges appointed by Democratic presidents tend to vote like Democrats. No surprise there. But such tendencies are accentuated when among like-minded judges, report David Schkade and Cass Sunstein (2003): “A Republican appointee sitting with two other Republicans votes far more conservatively than when the same judge sits with at least one Democratic appointee. A Democratic appointee, meanwhile, shows the same tendency in the opposite ideological direction.”

“What explains the rise of fascism in the 1930s? The emergence of student radicalism in the 1960s? The growth of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s? . . . The unifying theme is simple: When people find themselves in groups of like-minded types, they are especially likely to move to extremes. [This] is the phenomenon of group polarization.”

—Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes, 2009

Group Polarization in Schools Another real-life parallel to the laboratory phenomenon is what education researchers have called the “accentuation” effect: Over time, initial differences among groups of college students become accentuated. If the first-year students at Big Brain College are initially more intellectual than the students at Party School College, that gap is likely to increase by the time they graduate. Likewise, compared with fraternity and sorority members, nonmembers have tended to have more liberal political attitudes, a difference that grows with time in college (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). Researchers believe this results partly from group members reinforcing shared inclinations.

Group Polarization in Communities Polarization also occurs in communities, as people self-segregate. “Crunchy places . . . attract crunchy types and become crunchier,” observes David Brooks (2005). “Conservative places . . . attract conservatives and become more so.” Neighborhoods can become echo chambers, with opinions ricocheting off kindred-spirited friends.

Show social psychologists a like-minded group that interacts mostly among themselves and they will show you a group that may become more extreme. While diversity moderates us, like minds polarize.

One experiment assembled small groups of Coloradoans in liberal Boulder and conservative Colorado Springs. The discussions increased agreement within small groups about global warming, affirmative action, and same-sex unions. Nevertheless, those in Boulder generally converged further left and those in Colorado Springs further right (Schkade et al., 2007).

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In laboratory studies, the competitive relationships and mistrust that individuals often display when playing games with one another often worsen when the players are groups (Winquist & Larson, 2004). During actual community conflicts, like-minded people associate increasingly with one another, amplifying their shared tendencies. Gang delinquency emerges from a process of mutual reinforcement within neighborhood gangs, whose members share attributes and hostilities (Cartwright, 1975). If “a second out-of-control 15-year-old moves in [on your block],” surmises David Lykken (1997), “the mischief they get into as a team is likely to be more than merely double what the first would do on his own. . . . A gang is more dangerous than the sum of its individual parts.” (Or, as one friend of mine [JT] put it when we were in college and had witnessed a few too many drunken antics, “Boys do dumb things when they get together in groups.”) Indeed, “unsupervised peer groups” are “the strongest predictor” of a neighborhood’s crime victimization rate, report Bonita Veysey and Steven Messner (1999). Moreover, experimental interventions that take delinquent adolescents and group them with other delinquents—no surprise to any group polarization researcher—increase the rate of problem behavior (Dishion et al., 1999).

In two trials, South African courts reduced sentences after learning how social psychological phenomena, including deindividuation and group polarization, led crowd members to commit murderous acts (Colman, 1991). What do you think: Should courts consider social psychological phenomena as possible extenuating circumstances?

Group Polarization in Politics With like-minded communities serving as political echo chambers, the United States offers a case example of an urgent social problem—political polarization. As more and more people view their party as morally superior and the opposition as corrupt, cooperation and shared goals get replaced by gridlock. Consider:

Like-minded counties. The percentage of Americans living in “landslide counties”—those in which 60% or more voted for the same Presidential candidate—rose from 38% in 1992 to 60% in 2016 (Aisch et al., 2016).

Minimized middle ground. The percentage of entering collegians declaring themselves as politically “middle of the road” dropped from 60% in 1983 to 42% in 2016, and those identifying as “far left” or “far right” has increased (Eagan et al., 2017; Twenge et al., 2016).

Increasing partisan divide. The gap between Republicans and Democrats, as expressed in congressional speeches and in citizen attitudes, has never been greater (Figure 9) (Gentzkow et al., 2017; Pew, 2017).

Antagonism. In 2016, most Republicans and Democrats for the first time acknowledged having “very unfavorable” views of the other party (Doherty & Kiley, 2016). In 1960, just 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats said they would be upset if their son or daughter was going to marry someone from the other political party. By 2010, 49% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats said they would be upset (Iyengar et al., 2012).

Persistent partisanship. The rate of Americans’ voting for the same party across successive presidential elections has never been higher (Smidt, 2017).

FIGURE 9 A polarizing society. Democrats have increasingly agreed that “Racial discrimination is the main reason why many Black people can’t get ahead these days” (Pew, 2017). Republicans have become less likely to agree.

This worsening divide is increasingly apparent to all, with a record 77% of Americans perceiving their nation as divided (Jones, 2016).

Groups often exceed individuals. A gang is more dangerous than the sum of its parts, much as “the pack is greater than the wolf.”©Raimund Linke/Getty Images

Group Polarization on the Internet From the long-ago invention of the printing press to today’s Internet, the amount of available information has mushroomed. Where once people shared the same information from a few networks and national news magazines, today we choose from a myriad of sources. With so many choices, we naturally “selectively expose” ourselves to like-minded media (Dylko et al., 2017).

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We embrace media feeds that support our views and slam those we despise. (Tell us which media you consume and we’ll guess your political ideology.)

As people selectively read blogs and visit chat rooms, does the Internet herd them into “tribes of common thought” (or do we have more—and more diverse—friends on Facebook than in daily life)? Do people (do you?) tend to click on content they (you?) agree with and block what’s disagreeable? Do progressives tend to friend progressives and share links with them, and likewise conservatives? Do the Internet’s segregated communities, with news feeds catering to their interests, amplify social fragmentation and political polarization?

The Internet’s countless virtual groups enable peacemakers and neo-Nazis, geeks and goths, conspiracy schemers and cancer survivors to isolate themselves with like-minded others and find support for their shared concerns, interests, and suspicions (Gerstenfeld et al., 2003; McKenna & Bargh, 1998, 2000; Sunstein, 2009, 2016). With retweets, customized news feeds, and self-selections from the news buffet, like minds feed one another valuable information—and toxic misinformation: untruths that, after many retellings, get accepted as fact (Barberá et al., 2015). Thus, disagreements become demonization and suspicions escalate to paranoia.

Research confirms that most of us read blogs that reinforce rather than challenge our views, and those blogs link mostly to like-minded blogs—connecting liberals with liberals, conservatives with conservatives—like having conversations with the bathroom mirror (Lazer et al., 2009). The net result is that in today’s world, political polarization—despising people of opposing political views—has become considerably more intense than racial polarization (Iyengar & Westwood, 2014). More information deepens rather than moderates partisan divisions. E-mail, Google, and chat rooms “make it much easier for small groups to rally like-minded people, crystallize diffuse hatreds, and mobilize lethal force,” observed Robert Wright (2003). Peacemakers become more pacifistic and militia members more terror prone. According to one analysis, terrorist websites—which grew from a dozen in 1997 to some 4,700 at the end of 2005—increased more than four times faster than the total number of websites (Ariza, 2006). Moreover, the longer people spend in segregated “Dark Web” forums, the more violent their messages (Chen, 2012). The Boston Marathon bombers Tamerland and Dozhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly were “self-radicalized” through their Internet exposure (Wilson et al., 2013).

“We thought Internet would give us access to ppl w different points of view. Instead it gives us access to many ppl w the same point of view.”

Comedian Kumail Nanjiani, 2016 tweet

The bottom line: On our list of the future’s great challenges, somewhere not far below restraining climate change, is learning how to harness the great benefits of the digital future and its more connected world, but without exacerbating group polarization.

Group Polarization in Terrorist Organizations From their analysis of terrorist organizations throughout the world, Clark McCauley and his colleagues (2002; McCauley & Moskalenko, 2017) note that terrorism does not erupt suddenly: “Lone-wolf terrorists are rare.” Rather, it arises among people whose shared grievances bring them together and fan their fire. As they interact in isolation from moderating influences, they become progressively more extreme. The social amplifier brings the signal in more strongly. The result is violent acts that the individuals, apart from the group, would never have committed (see Focus On: Group Polarization).

For example, the September 11, 2001, terrorists were bred by a long process that engaged the polarizing effect of interaction among the like-minded. The process of becoming a terrorist, noted a National Research Council panel, isolates individuals from other belief systems, dehumanizes potential targets, and tolerates no dissent (Smelser & Mitchell, 2002). Group members come to categorize the world as “us” and “them” (Moghaddam, 2005; Qirko, 2004). Ariel Merari (2002), an investigator of Middle Eastern and Sri Lankan suicide terrorism, believes the key to creating a terrorist suicide is the group process. “To the best of my knowledge, there has not been a single case of suicide terrorism which was done on a personal whim.”

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focus ON

Group Polarization

Shakespeare portrayed the polarizing power of the like-minded group in this dialogue of Julius Caesar’s followers:

Antony: Kind souls, what weep you when you but behold Our Caesar’s vesture wounded? Look you here. Here is himself, marr’d, as you see, with traitors.

First Citizen: O piteous spectacle!

Second Citizen: O noble Caesar!

Third Citizen: O woeful day!

Fourth Citizen: O traitors, villains!

First Citizen: O most bloody sight!

Second Citizen: We will be revenged!

All: Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay! Let not a traitor live!

Source: From Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Act III, Scene ii, lines 199–209.

According to one analysis of terrorists who were members of the Salafi Jihad—an Islamic fundamentalist movement, including al Qaeda—70% joined while living as expatriates. After moving to foreign places in search of jobs or education, they became keenly mindful of their Muslim identity and often gravitated to mosques and moved in with other expatriate Muslims, who sometimes recruited them into cell groups that provided “mutual emotional and social support” and “development of a common identity” (Reicher & Haslam, 2016; Sageman, 2004). One of the Islamic State’s senior militants reported that his movement was born inside an American prison in Iraq: “If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. [The prison] was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology. . . . We had so much time to sit and plan. It was the perfect environment” (quoted by Chulov, 2014).

Massacres, similarly, are group phenomena. The violence is enabled and escalated by the killers egging one another on, noted Robert Zajonc (2000), who knew violence as a survivor of a World War II Warsaw air raid that killed both his parents (Burnstein, 2009). It is difficult to influence someone once “in the pressure cooker of the terrorist group,” noted Jerrold Post (2005) after interviewing many accused terrorists. “In the long run, the most effective antiterrorist policy is one that inhibits potential recruits from joining in the first place.”

Explaining Group Polarization

Why do groups adopt stances that are more exaggerated than that of their average individual member? Researchers hoped that solving the mystery of group polarization might provide some insights into group influence. Solving small puzzles sometimes provides clues for solving larger ones.

Among several proposed theories of group polarization, two have survived scientific scrutiny. One deals with the arguments presented during a discussion and is an example of informational influence (influence that results from accepting evidence about reality). The other concerns how members of a group view themselves vis-à-vis the other members, an example of normative influence (influence based on a person’s desire to be accepted or admired by others).

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

—Charles F. Brannan, Secretary of Agriculture, NBC broadcast, April 3, 1949

INFORMATIONAL INFLUENCE

According to the best-supported explanation, group discussion elicits a pooling of ideas, most of which favor the dominant viewpoint. Some discussed ideas are common knowledge to group members (Gigone & Hastie, 1993; Larson et al., 1994; Stasser, 1991). Other ideas may include persuasive arguments that some group members had not previously considered. When discussing Helen the writer, someone may say, “Helen should go for it, because she

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has little to lose. If her novel flops, she can always go back to writing cheap westerns.” Such statements often entangle information about the person’s arguments with cues concerning the person’s position on the issue. But when people hear relevant arguments without learning the specific stands other people assume, they still shift their positions (Burnstein & Vinokur, 1977; Hinsz et al., 1997). Arguments, in and of themselves, matter.

But there’s more to attitude change than merely hearing someone else’s arguments. Active participation in discussion produces more attitude change than does passive listening. Participants and observers hear the same ideas. But when participants express them in their own words, the verbal commitment magnifies the impact. The more group members repeat one another’s ideas, the more they rehearse and validate them (Brauer et al., 1995).

Pluralistic ignorance: Sometimes a false presumption of another’s disinterest may prevent two people with a mutual romantic interest from connecting.©visualspace/E+/Getty Images

People’s minds are not just blank tablets for persuaders to write upon. With central route persuasion, what people think in response to a message is crucial. Indeed, just thinking about an issue for a couple of minutes can strengthen opinions (Tesser et al., 1995). (Perhaps you can recall your feelings becoming polarized as you merely ruminated about someone you disliked, or liked.)

NORMATIVE INFLUENCE

A second explanation of polarization involves comparison with others. As Leon Festinger (1954) argued in his influential theory of

social comparison, we humans want to evaluate our opinions and abilities by comparing our views with others’. We are most persuaded by people in our “reference groups”—groups we identify with (Abrams et al., 1990; Hogg et al., 1990). Moreover, we want people to like us, so we may express stronger opinions after discovering that others share our views.

When we ask people (as we asked you earlier) to predict how others would respond to items such as the “Helen” dilemma, they typically exhibit

pluralistic ignorance: They don’t realize how strongly others support the socially preferred tendency (in this case, writing the novel). A typical person will advise writing the novel even if its chance of success is only 4 in 10 but will estimate that most other people would require 5 or 6 in 10. (This finding is reminiscent of the self-serving bias: People tend to view themselves as better-than-average embodiments of socially desirable traits and attitudes.) When the discussion begins, most people discover they are not outshining the others as they had supposed. In fact, others are ahead of them, having taken an even stronger position in favor of writing the novel. No longer restrained by a misperceived group norm, they are liberated to voice their preferences more strongly.

Perhaps you can recall a time when you and someone else wanted to date each other but each of you feared to make the first move, presuming the other was not interested. Such pluralistic ignorance impedes the start-up of relationships (Vorauer & Ratner, 1996).

Or perhaps you can recall when you and others were guarded and reserved in a group, until someone broke the ice and said, “Well, to be perfectly honest, I think. . . .” Soon you were all surprised to discover strong support for your shared views. Sometimes when a professor asks if anyone has any questions, no one will respond, leading each student to infer that he or she is the only one confused. All presume that fear of embarrassment explains their own silence but that everyone else’s silence means they understand the material.

An Economist cover about a stock market crash.Reprinted by permission of Kevin Kal Kallaugher, The Economist, Kaltoons.com

Social comparison theory prompted experiments that exposed people to others’ positions but not to their arguments. This is roughly the experience we have when reading the results of an opinion poll or of exit polling on election

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day. When people learn others’ positions—without prior commitment and without discussion or sharing of arguments—will they adjust their responses to maintain a socially favorable position? As Figure 10 illustrates, they will. This comparison-based polarization is usually less than that produced by a lively discussion. Still, it’s surprising that instead of simply conforming to the group average, people often go it one better.

FIGURE 10 On “risky” dilemma items (such as the case of Helen), mere exposure to others’ judgments enhanced individuals’ risk-prone tendencies. On “cautious” dilemma items (such as the case of Roger), exposure to others’ judgments enhanced their cautiousness.Source: Data from Myers, 1978.

Merely learning others’ choices also contributes to the bandwagon effect that creates blockbuster songs, books, and movies. One experiment engaged 14,341 Internet participants in listening to and, if they wished, downloading previously unknown songs (Salganik et al., 2006). The researchers randomly assigned some participants to a condition that disclosed previous participants’ download choices. Among those given that information, popular songs became more popular and unpopular songs became less popular.

Group polarization research illustrates the complexity of social-psychological inquiry. Much as we like our explanations of a phenomenon to be simple, one explanation seldom accounts for all the data. Because people are complex, more than one factor frequently influences an outcome. In group discussions, persuasive arguments predominate on issues that have a factual element (“Is she guilty of the crime?”). Social comparison sways responses on value-laden judgments (“How long a sentence should she serve?”) (Kaplan, 1989). On the many issues that have both factual and value-laden aspects, the two factors work together. Discovering that others share one’s feelings (social comparison) unleashes arguments (informational influence) supporting what everyone secretly favors.

SUMMING UP: Group Polarization: Do Groups Intensify Our Opinions?

Potentially positive and negative results arise from group discussion. While trying to understand the curious finding that discussion increased risk taking, investigators discovered that discussion actually tends to strengthen whatever is the initially dominant point of view, whether risky or cautious.

In everyday situations, too, group interaction tends to intensify opinions. This group polarization phenomenon provided a window through which researchers could observe group influence.

Experiments confirmed two group influences: informational and normative. The information gleaned from a discussion mostly favors the initially preferred alternative, thus reinforcing support for it.

GROUPTHINK: DO GROUPS HINDER OR ASSIST GOOD DECISIONS?

Describe when and why group influences often hinder good decisions. Describe also when groups promote good decisions and how we can lead groups to make optimal decisions.

Do the social psychological phenomena we have been considering occur in sophisticated groups such as corporate boards or a president’s cabinet? Is there likely to be self-justification? Self-serving bias? A cohesive “we feeling” promoting conformity which stifles dissent? Public commitment producing resistance to change? Group polarization?

Social psychologist Irving Janis (1971, 1982) wondered whether such phenomena might help explain good and bad group decisions made by some twentieth-century American presidents and their advisers. To find out, he analyzed the decision-making procedures behind several major fiascos:

Pearl Harbor. In the weeks before the December 1941 attack that brought the United States into World War II, military commanders in Hawaii received a stream of information about Japan’s preparations for an attack on the United States somewhere in the Pacific. Military intelligence then lost radio contact with Japanese aircraft carriers, which had begun moving straight for Hawaii. Air reconnaissance could have spotted the carriers or at least provided a few minutes’ warning. But complacent commanders decided against such precautions. The result: No alert was sounded until the attack on a virtually defenseless base was under way. The loss: 18 ships, 170 planes, and 2,400 lives.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion. In 1961, President John Kennedy and his advisers tried to overthrow Fidel Castro by invading Cuba with 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles. Nearly all the invaders were soon killed or captured, the United States was humiliated, and Cuba allied itself more closely with the former U.S.S.R. After learning the outcome, Kennedy wondered aloud, “How could we have been so stupid?”

The Vietnam War. From 1964 to 1967, President Lyndon Johnson and his “Tuesday lunch group” of policy advisers escalated the war in Vietnam on the assumption that U.S. aerial bombardment, defoliation, and search-and-destroy missions would bring North Vietnam to the peace table with the appreciative support of the South Vietnamese populace. They continued the escalation despite warnings from government intelligence experts and nearly all U.S. allies. The resulting disaster cost more than 58,000 American and 1 million Vietnamese lives, polarized Americans, drove the president from office, and created huge budget deficits that helped fuel inflation in the 1970s.

The USS Arizona burning after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.©National Archives and Records Administration (NLR-PHOCO-A-8150(29)

Janis believed those blunders were bred by the tendency of decision-making groups to suppress dissent in the interest of group harmony, a phenomenon he called

groupthink. (See “The Inside Story: Irving Janis on Groupthink.”) In work groups, team spirit is good for morale and boosts productivity (Mellers et al., 2014; Mullen & Copper, 1994). A shared group identity motivates people to persist on a project (Haslam et al., 2014). But when making decisions, close-knit groups may pay a price. Janis believed that the soil from which groupthink sprouts includes

an amiable, cohesive group;

relative isolation of the group from dissenting viewpoints; and

a directive leader who signals what decision he or she favors.

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THE inside STORY

Irving Janis on Groupthink

The idea of groupthink hit me while reading Arthur Schlesinger’s account of how the Kennedy administration decided to invade the Bay of Pigs. At first, I was puzzled: How could bright, shrewd people like John F. Kennedy and his advisers be taken in by the CIA’s stupid, patchwork plan? I began to wonder whether some kind of psychological contagion had interfered, such as social conformity or the concurrence-seeking that I had observed in cohesive small groups. Further study (initially aided by my daughter Charlotte’s work on a high school term paper) convinced me that subtle group processes had hampered their carefully appraising the risks and debating the issues. When I then analyzed other U.S. foreign policy fiascos and the Watergate cover-up, I found the same detrimental group processes at work.

Irving Janis (1918–1990) Courtesy of Irving Janis

When planning the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, for example, the newly elected President Kennedy and his advisers enjoyed a strong esprit de corps. Arguments critical of the plan were suppressed or excluded, and the president soon endorsed the invasion.

Symptoms of Groupthink

From historical records and the memoirs of participants and observers, Janis identified eight groupthink symptoms. The symptoms are a collective form of dissonance reduction as group members, when facing a threat, try to maintain their positive group feeling (Turner & Pratkanis, 1994; Turner et al., 1992).

Self-censorship contributes to an illusion of unanimity.©Henry Martin. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The first two groupthink symptoms lead group members to overestimate their group’s might and right.

An illusion of invulnerability. The groups Janis studied all developed an excessive optimism that blinded them to warnings of danger. Told that his forces had lost radio contact with the Japanese carriers, Admiral Kimmel, the chief naval officer at Pearl Harbor, joked that maybe the Japanese were about to round Honolulu’s Diamond Head. They actually were, but Kimmel’s laughing at the idea dismissed the very possibility of its being true.

Unquestioned belief in the group’s morality. Group members assume the inherent morality of their group and ignore ethical and moral issues. The Kennedy group knew that adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Senator J. William Fulbright had moral reservations about invading a small, neighboring country. But the group never entertained or discussed those moral qualms.

Group members also become closed-minded.

Rationalization. The groups discount challenges by collectively justifying their decisions. President Johnson’s Tuesday lunch group spent far more time rationalizing (explaining and justifying) than reflecting

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upon and rethinking prior decisions to escalate. Each initiative became an action to defend and justify.

Stereotyped view of opponent. Groupthinkers consider their enemies too evil to negotiate with or too weak and unintelligent to defend themselves against the planned initiative. The Kennedy group convinced itself that Castro’s military was so weak and his popular support so shallow that a single brigade could easily overturn his regime.

Finally, the group suffers from pressures toward uniformity.

Conformity pressure. Group members rebuffed those who raised doubts about the group’s assumptions and plans, at times by personal sarcasm. Once, when President Johnson’s assistant Bill Moyers arrived at a meeting, the president derided him with, “Well, here comes Mr. Stop-the-Bombing.” Faced with such ridicule, most people fall into line. As with social loafing and deindividuation, groupthink debilitates performance when the individual self is submerged to a group (Baumeister et al., 2016).

Self-censorship. To avoid uncomfortable disagreements, members withheld or discounted their misgivings. In the months following the Bay of Pigs invasion, Arthur Schlesinger (1965, p. 255) reproached himself “for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the Cabinet Room, though my feelings of guilt were tempered by the knowledge that a course of objection would have accomplished little save to gain me a name as a nuisance.” It’s not just politicians. Both online and in person, people are less willing to share their view when they think others disagree (Hampton et al., 2014).

People “are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.”

—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Illusion of unanimity. Self-censorship and pressure not to puncture the consensus create an illusion of unanimity. What is more, the apparent consensus confirms the group’s decision. This appearance of consensus was evident in the Pearl Harbor, Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam fiascos and in other fiascos before and since. Albert Speer (1971), an adviser to Adolf Hitler, described the atmosphere around Hitler as one where pressure to conform suppressed all deviation. The absence of dissent created an illusion of unanimity:

In normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives. . . . No external factors disturbed the uniformity of hundreds of unchanging faces, all mine. (p. 379)

Mindguards. Some members protect the group from information that would call into question the effectiveness or morality of its decisions. Before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Robert Kennedy took Schlesinger aside and told him, “Don’t push it any further.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk withheld diplomatic and intelligence experts’ warnings against the invasion. They thus served as the president’s “mindguards,” protecting him from disagreeable facts rather than physical harm.

Groupthink on a Titanic scale. Despite four messages of possible icebergs ahead, Captain Edward Smith—a directive and respected leader—kept his ship sailing at full speed into the night. There was an illusion of invulnerability (many believed the ship to be unsinkable). There was conformity pressure (crew mates chided the lookout for not being able to use his naked eye and dismissed his misgivings). And there was mindguarding (a Titanic telegraph operator failed to pass the last and most complete iceberg warning to Captain Smith).©Everett Historical/Shutterstock

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Groupthink symptoms can produce a failure to seek and discuss contrary information and alternative possibilities (Figure 11). When a leader promotes an idea and when a group insulates itself from dissenting views, groupthink may produce defective decisions (McCauley, 1989).

FIGURE 11Theoretical Analysis of GroupthinkSource: Adapted from Janis & Mann, 1977, p. 132.

British psychologists Ben Newell and David Lagnado (2003) believe groupthink symptoms may have also contributed to the Iraq war. They and others contended that both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush surrounded themselves with like-minded advisers and intimidated opposing voices into silence. Moreover, they each received filtered information that mostly supported their assumptions—Iraq’s expressed assumption that the invading force could be resisted; and the United States’ assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that its people would welcome invading soldiers as liberators, and that a short, peaceful occupation would soon lead to a thriving democracy.

Critiquing Groupthink

Despite the power and fame of the groupthink concept, some researchers have been skeptical (Fuller & Aldag, 1998; t’Hart, 1998). The evidence was retrospective, so Janis could pick supporting cases. Follow-up experiments have, however, supported aspects of Janis’s theory:

Directive leadership is indeed associated with poorer decisions, because subordinates sometimes feel too weak or insecure to speak up (Granstrom & Stiwne, 1998; McCauley, 1998).

Groups do prefer supporting over challenging information (Schulz-Hardt et al., 2000).

When members look to a group for acceptance, approval, and social identity, they may suppress disagreeable thoughts (Hogg & Hains, 1998; Turner & Pratkanis, 1997).

Groups that make smart decisions have widely distributed conversation, with socially attuned members who take turns speaking (Woolley et al., 2010).

Groups with diverse perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts (Nemeth & Ormiston, 2007; Page, 2007). Engaging people who think differently from you can make you feel uncomfortable. But compared with comfortably homogeneous groups, diverse groups tend to produce more ideas and greater creativity.

Group success depends both on what group members know and how effectively they can share that information (Bonner & Baumann, 2012). In discussion, unshared information often gets suppressed as discussion focuses on what group members all know already (Sunstein & Hastie, 2008).

Yet friendships need not breed groupthink (Esser, 1998; Mullen et al., 1994). In a secure, highly cohesive group (say, a family), committed members will often care enough to voice disagreement (Packer, 2009). The norms of a cohesive group can favor either consensus,

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which can lead to groupthink, or critical analysis, which prevents it (Postmes et al., 2001). When academic colleagues in a close-knit department share their draft manuscripts with one another, they want critique: “Do what you can to save me from my own mistakes.” In a free-spirited atmosphere, cohesion can enhance effective teamwork, too.

“Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”

—Attributed to Philosopher David Hume (1711–1776)

Moreover, when Philip Tetlock and colleagues (1992) looked at a broader sample of historical episodes, it became clear that even good group procedures sometimes yield ill-fated decisions. As President Carter and his advisers plotted their humiliating attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, they welcomed different views and realistically considered the perils. Had it not been for helicopter problems, the rescue might have succeeded. (Carter later reflected that had he sent in one more helicopter, he would have been reelected president.) Sometimes good groups suffer bad outcomes.

Preventing Groupthink

Flawed group dynamics help explain many failed decisions; sometimes too many cooks spoil the broth. However, given open leadership, a cohesive team spirit can improve decisions. Sometimes two or more heads are better than one.

In search of conditions that breed good decisions, Janis also analyzed two successful ventures: the Truman administration’s formulation of the Marshall Plan for getting Europe back on its feet after World War II and the Kennedy administration’s successful challenge of the Soviet Union’s 1962 attempt to install missile bases in Cuba. Janis’s (1982) recommendations for preventing groupthink incorporate many of the effective group procedures used in both cases:

“One of the dangers in the White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in groupthink and everybody agrees with everything and there’s no discussion and there are no dissenting views. So I’m going to be welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House.”

—Barack Obama, at a December 1, 2008, Press Conference

Be impartial—do not endorse any position. Don’t start group discussions by having people state their positions; doing so suppresses information sharing and degrades the quality of decisions (Mojzisch & Schulz-Hardt, 2010).

Encourage critical evaluation; assign a “devil’s advocate.” Better yet, welcome the input of a genuine dissenter, which does even more to stimulate original thinking and to open a group to opposing views, report Charlan Nemeth and colleagues (2001a,b).

Occasionally subdivide the group, then reunite to air differences.

Welcome critiques from outside experts and associates.

Before implementing, call a “second-chance” meeting to air any lingering doubts.

When such steps are taken, group decisions may take longer to make, yet ultimately prove less defective and more effective.

Group Problem Solving

Multiple heads are often better than one. Not every group decision is flawed by groupthink. In work settings such as operating rooms and executive boardrooms, team decisions surpass individual decisions when the discussion values each person’s skills and knowledge and draws out their varied information (Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, 2009).

Should some ideas not be heard? Groupthink suggests that groups come to better decisions when disagreement is encouraged rather than disencouraged—something to keep in mind when discussing issues on campus.©Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

Patrick Laughlin and John Adamopoulos (1980; Laughlin, 1996; Laughlin et al., 2003) have shown the wisdom of groups with various intellectual tasks. Consider one of their analogy problems:

Assertion is to disproved as action is to

hindered

opposed

illegal

precipitate

thwarted

Most college students miss this question when answering alone, but answer correctly (thwarted) after discussion.

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Moreover, Laughlin found that if just two members of a six-person group are initially correct, two-thirds of the time they convince all the others. If only one person is correct, this “minority of one” almost three-fourths of the time fails to convince the group. And when given tricky logic problems, three, four, or five heads are better than two (Laughlin et al., 2006).

Studies of the accuracy of eyewitness reports of a videotaped crime or job interview confirm that several heads can be better than one (Hinsz, 1990; Warnick & Sanders, 1980). Interacting groups of eyewitnesses give accounts that are much more accurate than those provided by the average isolated individual. Two heads are better than one even for simple perceptual judgments made by similarly capable people (Bahrami et al., 2010; Ernst, 2010). When unsure of what they’ve seen, sports referees are smart to confer before making their call.

Contrary to popular belief, brainstorming sessions with groups do not generate better ideas or more creative ones.©wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

Several heads critiquing one another can also allow the group to avoid some forms of cognitive bias and produce higher quality ideas (McGlynn et al., 1995; Wright et al., 1990). Out of the arguments of the Wright brothers came the first airplane. Out of the incessant debates between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak came the first Apple computer (Grant, 2017). In science, the benefits of diverse minds collaborating has led to more and more “team science”—to an increasing proportion of scientific publication, especially highly cited publication, by multi-author teams (Cacioppo, 2007). Teams also have surpassed individuals in predicting world political events (Mellers et al., 2014, 2015).

“Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another.”

—Proverbs 27:17

The limits of brainstorming. But contrary to the popular idea that face-to-face brainstorming generates more creative ideas than do the same people working alone, researchers agree it isn’t so (Paulus et al., 1995, 2000, 2011; Stroebe & Diehl, 1994). And contrary to the popular idea that brainstorming is most productive when the brainstormers are admonished “not to criticize,” encouraging people to debate stimulates ideas and extends creative thinking beyond the brainstorming session (Nemeth et al., 2004).

People feel more productive when generating ideas in groups (partly because people disproportionately credit themselves for the ideas that come out). But time and again researchers have found that people working alone usually will generate more good ideas than will the same people in a group (Nijstad et al., 2006; Rietzschel et al., 2006). Large brainstorming groups are especially inefficient. Better to have people generate ideas individually, then stimulate each other in small groups (Paulus & Korde, 2014). In accord with social loafing theory, large groups cause some individuals to free-ride on others’ efforts. They cause others to feel apprehensive about voicing oddball ideas. And they cause “production blocking”—losing one’s ideas while awaiting a turn to speak (Nijstad & Stroebe, 2006).

As James Watson and Francis Crick demonstrated in discovering DNA, challenging two-person conversations can effectively engage creative thinking. Watson later recalled that he and Crick benefited from not being the most brilliant people seeking to crack the genetic code. The most brilliant researcher “was so intelligent that she rarely sought advice” (quoted by Cialdini, 2005). If you are (and regard yourself as) the most gifted person, why seek others’ input? Like Watson and Crick, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky similarly collaborated in their exploration of intuition and its influence on economic decision making. (See “The Inside Story: Behind a Nobel Prize.”)

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

—African Proverb

Vincent Brown and Paul Paulus (2002) have identified three ways to enhance group brainstorming:

Combine group and solitary brainstorming. Group brainstorming is most productive when it precedes solo brainstorming. With new categories primed by the group brainstorming, individuals’ ideas can continue flowing without being impeded by the group context that allows only one person to speak at a time. Creative work teams also tend to be small and to alternate working alone, working in pairs, and meeting as a circle (Paulus & Coskun, 2012).

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Have group members interact by writing. Another way to take advantage of group priming, without being impeded by the one-at-a-time rule, is to have group members write and read, rather than speak and listen. Moreover, when leaders urge people to generate lots of ideas (rather than just good ideas), they generate both more ideas and more good ideas (Paulus et al., 2011). So whatever comes to mind, put it down.

Incorporate electronic brainstorming. There is a potentially more efficient way to avoid the verbal traffic jams of traditional group brainstorming in larger groups: Let individuals produce and read ideas on networked computers.

THE inside STORY

Behind a Nobel Prize: Two Minds Are Better Than One

In the spring of 1969, Amos Tversky, my younger colleague at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I met over lunch and shared our own recurrent errors of judgment. From there were born our studies of human intuition.

I had enjoyed collaboration before, but this was magical. Amos was very smart, and also very funny. We could spend hours of solid work in continuous mirth. His work was always characterized by confidence and by a crisp elegance, and it was a joy to find those characteristics now attached to my ideas as well. As we were writing our first paper, I was conscious of how much better it was than the more hesitant piece I would have written by myself.

All our ideas were jointly owned. We did almost all the work on our joint projects while physically together, including the drafting of questionnaires and papers. Our principle was to discuss every disagreement until it had been resolved to our mutual satisfaction.

Some of the greatest joys of our collaboration—and probably much of its success—came from our ability to elaborate on each other’s nascent thoughts: If I expressed a half-formed idea, I knew that Amos would be there to understand it, probably more clearly than I did, and that if it had merit, he would see it.

Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs—a joint mind that was better than our separate minds. We were a team, and we remained in that mode for well over a decade. The Nobel Prize was awarded for work that we produced during that period of intense collaboration.

Daniel KahnemanPrinceton University, Nobel Laureate, 2002 Courtesy of Daniel Kahneman

So, when group members freely combine their creative ideas and varied insights, the frequent result is not groupthink but group problem solving. The wisdom of groups is evident in everyday life as well as in the laboratory:

Weather forecasting. “Two forecasters will come up with a forecast that is more accurate than either would have come up with working alone,” reported Joel Myers (1997), president of the largest private weather forecasting service. In 2010, scientists’ predictions of the summer’s minimum Arctic sea ice ranged from 2.5 million to 5.6 million square kilometers. The average prediction—4.8 million—almost exactly matched the actual result (Wiltze, 2010).

Google. Google has become a dominant search engine by harnessing what James Surowiecki (2004) calls The Wisdom of Crowds. Google interprets a link to Page X as a vote for Page X, and weights most heavily links from pages that are themselves highly ranked.

The “crowd within.” Likewise, the average of different guesses from the same persons tends to surpass the person’s individual guesses (Herzog & Hertwig, 2009). Edward Vul and Harold Pashler (2008) discovered this when asking people to guess the correct answers to factual questions such as “What percentage of the world’s airports are in the United States?” Then the researchers asked their participants to make a second guess, either immediately or three weeks later. The result? “You can gain

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about 1/10th as much from asking yourself the same question twice as you can from getting a second opinion from someone else, but if you wait three weeks, the benefit of re-asking yourself the same question rises to 1/3 the value of a second opinion.”

Prediction markets. In U.S. presidential elections since 1988, the final public opinion polls have provided a good gauge to the election result. An even better predictor, however, have been the election betting markets. Taking everything (including polls) into account, people buy and sell shares in candidates.

Combining expert predictions. In one study conducted in 2010, people worldwide estimated the odds of 199 events, such as Italy’s leader leaving office before January 1, 2012. When forecasters were trained to be wary of cognitive biases and shared information in teams—especially elite teams of previously successful “superforecasters”—they excelled (Mellers et al., 2014; Mannes et al., 2014).

Thus, we can conclude that when information from many, diverse people is combined, all of us together can become smarter than almost any of us alone. We’re in some ways like a flock of geese, no one of which has a perfect navigational sense. Nevertheless, by staying close to one another, a group of geese can navigate accurately. The flock is smarter than the bird.

SUMMING UP: Groupthink: Do Groups Hinder or Assist Good Decisions?

Analysis of several international fiascos indicates that group cohesion can override realistic appraisal of a situation. This is especially true when group members strongly desire unity, when they are isolated from opposing ideas, and when the leader signals what he or she wants from the group.

Symptomatic of this overriding concern for harmony, labeled groupthink, are (1) an illusion of invulnerability, (2) rationalization, (3) unquestioned belief in the group’s morality, (4) stereotyped views of the opposition, (5) pressure to conform, (6) self-censorship of misgivings, (7) an illusion of unanimity, and (8) “mindguards” who protect the group from unpleasant information. Critics have noted that some aspects of Janis’s groupthink model (such as directive leadership) seem more implicated in flawed decisions than others (such as cohesiveness).

Both in experiments and in actual history, however, groups sometimes decide wisely. These cases suggest ways to prevent groupthink: upholding impartiality, encouraging “devil’s advocate” positions, subdividing and then reuniting to discuss a decision, seeking outside input, and having a “second-chance” meeting before implementing a decision.

Research on group problem solving suggests that groups can be more accurate than individuals; groups also generate more and better ideas if the group is small or if, in a large group, individual brainstorming follows the group session.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE MINORITY: HOW DO INDIVIDUALS INFLUENCE THE GROUP?

Explain when—and how—individuals influence their groups. Identify what makes some individuals effective.

Each chapter in this social influence unit concludes with a reminder of our power as individuals. We have seen that

cultural situations mold us, but we also help create and choose these situations.

pressures to conform sometimes overwhelm our better judgment, but blatant pressure motivates reactance as we assert our individuality and freedom.

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persuasive forces are powerful, but we can resist persuasion by making public commitments and by anticipating persuasive appeals.

This chapter has emphasized group influences on the individual, so we conclude by seeing how individuals can influence their groups.

In the classic film 12 Angry Men, a lone juror eventually wins over 11 others. In a jury room, that’s a rare occurrence. Yet in most social movements, a small minority will sway, and then eventually become, the majority. “All history,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.” Think of Copernicus and Galileo, of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Susan B. Anthony, of Nelson Mandela. The American civil rights movement was ignited by the refusal of one African American woman, Rosa Parks, to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Technological history has also been made by innovative minorities. As Robert Fulton developed his steamboat—“Fulton’s Folly”—he endured constant derision: “Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, a warm wish, cross my path” (Cantril & Bumstead, 1960). Indeed, if minority viewpoints never prevailed, history would be static and nothing would ever change.

Note: “Minority influence” refers to minority opinions, not to ethnic minorities.

What makes a minority persuasive? What might Arthur Schlesinger have done to get the Kennedy group to consider his doubts about the Bay of Pigs invasion? Experiments initiated by Serge Moscovici in Paris identified several determinants of minority influence: consistency, self-confidence, and defection.

Consistency

More influential than a minority that wavers is a minority that sticks to its position. Moscovici and associates (1969; Moscovici, 1985) found that if a minority of participants consistently judges blue slides as green, members of the majority will occasionally agree. But if the minority wavers, saying “blue” to one-third of the blue slides and “green” to the rest, virtually no one in the majority will ever agree with “green.”

“If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Address, and Lectures: The American Scholar, 1849

Experiments show—and experience confirms—that nonconformity, especially persistent nonconformity, is often painful, and that being a minority in a group can be unpleasant (Levine, 1989; Lücken & Simon, 2005). That helps explain a minority slowness effect—a tendency for people with minority views to express those views less quickly than do people in the majority (Bassili, 2003). If you set out to be a minority of one, prepare yourself for ridicule—especially when you argue an issue that’s personally relevant to the majority and when the group wants to settle an issue by reaching consensus (Kameda & Sugimori, 1993; Kruglanski & Webster, 1991; Trost et al., 1992).

Even when people in the majority know that the disagreeing person is factually or morally right, they may still, if refusing to change, dislike the person (Chan et al., 2010). When Charlan Nemeth (1979, 2011) planted a minority of two within a simulated jury and had them oppose the majority’s opinions, the duo was inevitably disliked. Nevertheless, the majority acknowledged that the persistence of the two did more than anything else to make them rethink their positions. Compared to majority influence that often triggers unthinking agreement, minority influence stimulates a deeper processing of arguments, often with increased creativity (Kenworthy et al., 2008; Martin et al., 2007, 2008). Minority views may get you disliked, especially if you are on the fringe of a group, but they can also increase creative innovation (Rijnbout & McKimmie, 2012).

Some successful companies have recognized that minority perspectives can feed creativity and innovation. 3M, which has been famed for valuing “respect for individual initiative,” has welcomed employees spending time on wild ideas. The Post-it note’s adhesive was a failed attempt by Spencer Silver to develop a super-strong glue. Art Fry, after having trouble marking his church choir hymnal with pieces of paper, thought, “What I need is a bookmark with Spence’s adhesive along the edge.” His was a minority view that eventually won over a skeptical marketing department (Nemeth, 1997).

Over a period of time, a few people at 3M were consistent, self-confident, and persistent about the usefulness of the glue used on Post-it notes. These are three factors that may influence a majority group.©BananaStock

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Self-Confidence

Consistency and persistence convey self-confidence. Furthermore, Nemeth and Joel Wachtler (1974) reported that any behavior by a minority that conveys self-confidence—for example, taking the head seat at the table—tends to raise self-doubts among the majority. By being firm and forceful, the minority’s apparent self-assurance may prompt the majority to reconsider its position. This is especially so on matters of opinion (“from which country should Italy import most of its raw oil?”), rather than fact (“from which country does Italy import most of its raw oil?”) (Maass et al., 1996).

Defections from the Majority

A persistent minority punctures any illusion of unanimity. When a minority consistently doubts the majority wisdom, majority members become freer to express their own doubts and may even switch to the minority position. But what about a lone defector, someone who initially agreed with the majority but then reconsidered and dissented? In research with University of Pittsburgh students, John Levine (1989) found that a person who had defected from the majority was even more persuasive than a consistent minority voice. Nemeth’s jury-simulation experiments found that—not unlike the 12 Angry Men scenario—once defections begin, others often soon follow, initiating a snowball effect.

There is a delightful irony in this new emphasis on how individuals can influence the group. Until recently, the idea that the minority could sway the majority was itself a minority view in social psychology. Nevertheless, by arguing consistently and forcefully, Moscovici, Nemeth, Maass, and others convinced the majority of group influence researchers that minority influence is a phenomenon worthy of study. And the way that several of these minority influence researchers came by their interests should, perhaps, not surprise us. Anne Maass (1998) became interested in how minorities could effect social change after growing up in postwar Germany and hearing her grandmother’s personal accounts of fascism. Charlan Nemeth (1999) developed her interest while she was a visiting professor in Europe “working with Henri Tajfel and Serge Moscovici. The three of us were ‘outsiders’—I an American Roman Catholic female in Europe, they having survived World War II as Eastern European Jews. Sensitivity to the value and the struggles of the minority perspective came to dominate our work.”

Is Leadership Minority Influence?

In 1910, the Norwegians and the English engaged in an epic race to the South Pole. The Norwegians, effectively led by Roald Amundsen, made it. The English, ineptly led by Robert Falcon Scott, did not; Scott and three team members died. Amundsen illustrated the power of

leadership, the process by which individuals mobilize and guide groups.

Some leaders are formally appointed or elected; others emerge informally as the group interacts. What makes for good leadership often depends on the situation. The best person to lead the engineering team may not make the best leader of the sales force. Some people excel at task leadership—at organizing work, setting standards, and focusing on goal attainment. Others excel at social leadership—at building teamwork, mediating conflicts, and being supportive.

Task leaders generally have a directive style—one that can work well if the leader is bright enough to give good orders (Fiedler, 1987). Being goal oriented, such leaders also keep the group’s attention and effort focused on its mission. Experiments show that the combination of specific, challenging goals and periodic progress reports helps motivate high achievement (Locke & Latham, 1990, 2002, 2009). Men who have the traits associated with ancestral male leadership—fitness, height, masculine (wide) faces—tend to be perceived as dominant leaders and to succeed as CEOs (Blaker et al., 2013; Wong et al., 2011).

Social leaders generally have a democratic style—one that delegates authority, welcomes input from team members, and, as we have seen, helps prevent groupthink. Data amassed from 118 studies reveal that women are much more egalitarian than men; they are more opposed to social hierarchies (Lee et al., 2011). Many experiments reveal that social

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leadership is good for morale. Group members usually feel more satisfied when they participate in making decisions (Spector, 1986; Vanderslice et al., 1987). Given control over their tasks, workers also become more motivated to achieve (Burger, 1987).

focus ON

Transformational Community Leadership

As a striking example of transformational (consistent, self-confident, inspirational) leadership, consider Walt and Mildred Woodward. During World War II and in the two decades after, they owned and edited the Bainbridge Island, Washington, newspaper. It was from Bainbridge that, on March 30, 1942, the first of nearly 120,000 West Coast people of Japanese descent were relocated to internment camps. With 6 days’ notice and under armed guard, they boarded a ferry and were sent away, leaving behind on the dock tearful friends and neighbors (one of whom was their insurance agent, my [DM’s] father). “Where, in the face of their fine record since December 7 [Pearl Harbor Day], in the face of their rights of citizenship, in the face of their own relatives being drafted and enlisting in our Army, in the face of American decency, is there any excuse for this high-handed, much-too-short evacuation order?” editorialized the Woodwards (1942) in their Bainbridge Review. Throughout the war, the Woodwards, alone among West Coast newspaper editors, continued to voice opposition to the internment. They also recruited their former part-time employee, Paul Ohtaki, to write a weekly column bringing news of the incarcerated islanders. Stories by Ohtaki and others of “Pneumonia Hits ‘Grandpa Koura’” and “First Island Baby at Manzanar Born” reminded those back home of their absent neighbors and prepared the way for their eventual welcome home—a contrast to the prejudice that greeted their return to other West Coast communities where newspapers supported the internment and fostered hostility toward the Japanese.

After enduring some vitriolic opposition, the Woodwards lived to be honored for their courage, which was dramatized in the book and movie Snow Falling on Cedars. At the March 30, 2004, groundbreaking for a national memorial on the ferry departure site, former internee and Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community president Frank Kitamoto declared that “this memorial is also for Walt and Millie Woodward, for Ken Myers, for Genevive Williams . . . and the many others who supported us,” and who challenged the forced removal at the risk of being called unpatriotic. “Walt Woodward said if we can suspend the Bill of Rights for Japanese Americans it can be suspended for fat Americans or blue-eyed Americans.” Reflecting on the Woodwards’ transformational leadership, cub reporter Ohtaki (1999) observed that “on Bainbridge Island there was none of the hostility to the returning Japanese that you saw in other places, and I think that’s in large part because of the Woodwards.” When, later, he asked the Woodwards, “Why did you do this, when you could have dropped it and not suffered the anger of some of your readers?” they would always answer, “It was the right thing to do.”

In March 1942, 274 Bainbridge Islanders became the first of some 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants interned during World War II. Sixty-two years later, ground was broken for a national memorial (Nidoto Nai Yoni—Let It Not Happen Again), remembering the internees and the transformational leaders who supported them and prepared for their welcome home. ©Library of Congress/Corbis Historical/Getty Images

The once-popular “great person” theory of leadership—that all great leaders share certain traits—has fallen into disrepute. Effective leadership styles, we now know, are less

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about the big “I” than the big “we.” Effective leaders represent, enhance, and champion a group’s identity (Haslam et al., 2010). Effective leadership also varies with the situation. Subordinates who know what they are doing may resent working under task leadership, whereas those who don’t may welcome it. However, social psychologists have again wondered if there might be qualities that mark a good leader in many situations (Hogan et al., 1994). British social psychologists Peter Smith and Monir Tayeb (1989) report that studies done in India, Taiwan, and Iran have found that the most effective supervisors in coal mines, banks, and government offices scored high on tests of both task and social leadership. They are actively concerned with how work is progressing and sensitive to the needs of their subordinates.

Participative management, illustrated in this “quality circle,” requires democratic rather than autocratic leaders.©Yuri_Arcurs/E+/Getty Images

Studies also reveal that many effective leaders of laboratory groups, work teams, and large corporations not only avoid groupthink by welcoming diverse views, they also exhibit the behaviors that help make a minority view persuasive. Such leaders engender trust by consistently sticking to their goals. And they often exude a self-confident charisma that kindles the allegiance of their followers (Bennis, 1984; House & Singh, 1987). Effective leaders typically have a compelling vision of some desired state of affairs, especially during times of collective stress (Halevy et al., 2011). They also have an ability to communicate that vision to others in clear and simple language, and enough optimism and faith in their group to inspire others to follow. Socially dominant, influential individuals also seem competent (whether they are or not) because they act as if they were—by talking a lot (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009).

In one analysis of 50 Dutch companies, the highest morale was at firms with chief executives who most inspired their colleagues “to transcend their own self-interests for the sake of the collective” (de Hoogh et al., 2004). Leadership of this kind—transformational leadership—motivates others to identify with and commit themselves to the group’s mission. Transformational leaders—many of whom are charismatic, energetic, self-confident extraverts—articulate high standards, inspire people to share their vision, and offer personal attention (Bono & Judge, 2004). In organizations, the frequent result of such leadership is a more engaged, trusting, and effective workforce (Turner et al., 2002).

To be sure, groups also influence their leaders. Sometimes those at the front of the herd have simply sensed where it is already heading. Political candidates know how to read the opinion polls. Someone who typifies the group’s views is more likely to be selected as a leader; a leader who deviates too radically from the group’s standards may be rejected (Hogg et al., 1998). Smart leaders usually remain with the majority and spend their influence prudently. In rare circumstances, the right traits matched with the right situation yield history-making greatness, notes Dean Keith Simonton (1994). To have a Winston Churchill or a Thomas Jefferson, an Abraham Lincoln or a Martin Luther King, Jr., takes the right person in the right place at the right time. When an apt combination of intelligence, skill, determination, self-confidence, and social charisma meets a rare opportunity, the result is sometimes a championship, a Nobel Prize, or a social revolution.

Transformational leadership: Charismatic, energetic, self-confident people will sometimes change organizations or societies by inspiring others to embrace their vision. Martin Luther King, Jr. was this type of leader.Source: Lei Yixin/U.S. National Park Service

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SUMMING UP: The Influence of the Minority: How Do Individuals Influence the Group?

Although a majority opinion often prevails, sometimes a minority can influence and even overturn a majority position. Even if the majority does not adopt the minority’s views, the minority’s speaking up can increase the majority’s self-doubts and prompt it to consider other alternatives, often leading to better, more creative decisions.

In experiments, a minority is most influential when it is consistent and persistent in its views, when its actions convey self-confidence, and after it begins to elicit some defections from the majority. Such minority influence can enable creative motivation.

Through their task and social leadership, formal and informal group leaders exert disproportionate influence. Those who consistently press toward their goals and exude a self-confident charisma often engender trust and inspire others to follow.

POSTSCRIPT:

Are Groups Bad for Us?

A selective reading of this chapter could, we must admit, leave readers with the impression that, on balance, groups are bad. In groups we become more aroused, more stressed, more tense, more error-prone on complex tasks. Submerged in a group that gives us anonymity, we have a tendency to loaf or have our worst impulses unleashed by deindividuation. Police brutality, lynchings, gang destruction, and terrorism are all group phenomena. Discussion in groups often polarizes our views, enhancing mutual racism or hostility. It may also suppress dissent, creating a homogenized groupthink that produces disastrous decisions. No wonder we celebrate those individuals—minorities of one—who, alone against a group, have stood up for truth and justice. Groups, it seems, are ba-a-a-d.

All that is true, but it’s only half the truth. The other half is that, as social animals, we are group-dwelling creatures. Like our distant ancestors, we depend on one another for sustenance, support, and security. Moreover, when our individual tendencies are positive, group interaction accentuates our best. In groups, runners run faster, audiences laugh louder, and givers become more generous. In support groups, people strengthen their resolve to stop drinking, lose weight, and study harder. In kindred-spirited groups, people expand their spiritual consciousness. “A devout communing on spiritual things sometimes greatly helps the health of the soul,” observed fifteenth-century cleric Thomas à Kempis, especially when people of faith “meet and speak and commune together.”

Depending on which tendency a group is magnifying or disinhibiting, groups can be very, very bad or very, very good. So we had best choose our groups wisely and intentionally.

1This item, constructed for my [DM’s] own research, illustrates the sort of decision dilemma posed by Stoner.