Discussion 3

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Ch14Groups.pptx

Chapter 14

Groups

Today’s Outline

Groups

Deindividuation

Social facilitation

Social loafing

The accuracy of group decisions & thinking

Wisdom of crowds

Groupthink

Risky/Stingy Shifts

Leaders and leadership

Toxic and dangerous leaders

Leadership styles and power

What groups are and do

We divide ourselves into many different groups

Sometimes even just two people, a dyad, can count as group

Ideally, people want to have enough in common with a group to feel close to them, but also stand apart in some ways, called optimal distinctiveness

Groups, roles, & selves

Being in groups is double-edged sword

They help us to feel like we belong

Even when the group is complete nonsense (e.g. you were seated at table 1 with other people due to a coin flip), called the minimal group effect from Ch. 13 on prejudice

When our group does well we tend to ‘bask in the reflective glory’ and feel like we have done well also

E.g. when your favorite team wins an important game

Groups, roles, & selves continued

But groups can also have major downsides

We tend to assume there’s less variability within groups than between groups, but it’s the opposite

Deindividuation is a huge problem with groups!

A loss of self-awareness and individual accountability

when in groups (E.g. mob violence)

- Said another way, being anonymous. Often results

in aggression, we’ll come back to this in Ch. 10

Group action – Social Facilitation

If you play or played sports, did you like it when your parents or friends came to watch your games?

Personally I disliked it, felt like it made me play worse, I told them not to come lol

But research shows observers can indeed affect us

Recall back in chapter 1, Triplett’s original social psychology study that found bikers biked faster against people than against the clock

Social facilitation

Since Triplett’s studies, much

more research has been conducted!

One finding showed that if you replaced other bikers with just observers, people still biked harder than with no observers

Thus people called that evaluation apprehension

Concern about how others perceive you and your performance, we want it to be favorable

This can lead to more effort and better performance

But, the presence of others can make people perform worse too and ‘choke’ under pressure

Social facilitation

How do we resolve that discrepancy then?

Do people watching make us perform better or worse?

Zajonc (1965) proposed his social facilitation theory

Based on animal behavior, how the presence of animals of the same species increases an animals arousal and its most common response/behavior

Zajonc’s Social Facilitation Theory

Presence of other people leads

to arousal

Arousal leads to an increase in the

dominant response

Aka most common/typical

response

If that response is correct, you

perform better (social facilitation)

If it’s incorrect, you perform worse,

(social inhibition)

**Put more simply, if you’re

great at something and people

watch you, you’ll do better. If you

suck, you’ll do even worse

Social facilitation continued

Understood another way, if a task is new to you, observers will be harmful

Also if a task is complex, observers will be more likely to be harmful, but if it’s simple, observers will likely be helpful

You may recall our discussion of narcissists from before

Narcissists generally perform better when being observed because they’re ‘glory hounds’

They relish the chance to prove themselves superior

This can elicit resentment from teammates, who know they’re in it for individual instead of team glory

Evaluation apprehension

Evaluation apprehension can crop in other places too

Binge eating and purging can be a problem among younger women

Strangely though it went from an unheard of problem to relatively common…

One study found that sorority members who binge ate were more popular or highly regarded than ones who didn’t binge eat

We observe similar others and are tempted to engage in similar behavior, which spreads the problem

Social Loafing

As we touched on earlier, farmers noticed that increasing farmhands didn’t result in more output

Social loafing: people reduce effort when working in a group compared to working alone

Research on this asked participants to make as much noise as they can (as measured in decibels)

6 people didn’t really make any more noise than 3 people

Social loafing continued

Generally, people aren’t aware they’re socially loafing

If asked, participants will say they’re working their hardest

A similar, but distinct pattern, is ‘the free rider problem’

Where people deliberately don’t contribute

Free rider references the subway system in Europe where people were supposed to pay but didn’t

Have you ever done a group project with a free rider? Are you glad we don’t have any group projects? ;)

Social loafing continued

Explanations – why does social loafing occur

Research has shown that if people are not anonymous and their individual contribution to the effort is known, social loafing is greatly reduced

This gets back to the idea of deindividuation being bad

Accountability is good

Once group members suspect or find out someone else is loafing, they don’t want to be a sucker and do all the work, so then they loaf too!

Called the bad apple effect

Social Loafing continued

How do people react to social loafers?

Psychologists have studied this using game paradigms

Surprisingly, if a player finds out another player is socially loafing, that person will undermine their own chances of winning the game to punish the loafer

These findings surprised economists who assume people will act in their own best interest

The idea of altruistic punishment arose from this, that ultimately it’s in society’s best interest to punish social loafers

Tragedy of the commons

Regarding deindividuation and social loafing,

have you noticed how public rooms or public

areas usually get messy and/or damaged?

The ‘commons dilemma’ explains this

A tendency for jointly owned spaces, things, or resources, to be squandered

Explains, in part, why communism doesn’t work

Selfish impulses, like “should I just litter here or walk way over there to the trash can” often win out

How groups think

Are two heads really better than one?

Brainstorming

E.g. your boss calls a meeting and asks everyone to brainstorm some ideas about how to resolve a problem

People rate brainstorming as effective and rate it as enjoyable; boosts morale

But the output is actually worse than that of individuals

If done right though, it can have the desired effect

Participants must brainstorm individually and independently, then come together, and pool all of the ideas

‘The wisdom of crowds’

Sir Francis Galton started many lines of research later continued by psychologists

In general he thought people were pretty dumb and groups of people even dumber

He attended a county fair and asked everyone to guess (write on a sheet of paper) the weight of a cow

Well, specifically how much the cow would weigh after it had been slaughtered and chopped into piles of meat

The answer was 1,198 pounds

He tallied results from 800 tickets

The average estimate was 1,197 pounds. Incredibly close!

‘The wisdom of crowds’ continued

Sir Galton was forced to admit, the crowd did indeed have astounding wisdom

Similar results have been replicated in many settings

E.g. the final betting line in sports is always more accurate than any one expert

E.g. and the stock market predicts winning stocks better than any individual stock broker

Note that the conditions for all these studies meet the criteria of ‘independence’

This prevents conformity and allows for a diversity of opinions

Groupthink

Irving Janis came applied the term groupthink to social psychology

It explains the tendency of group members to think alike

Specifically, the group clings to some mistaken belief, which ends up resulting in bad decisions

There are many potential applications of groupthink in the real world

E.g. juries, business meetings, political committees, etc.

The root of groupthink is people’s desire to get along with one another

Groupthink continued

Several factors contribute to making groupthink more likely to occur:

Group members are similar to each other

A strong leader that people don’t want to contradict

The group is isolated from the opinions of others

The group has high self-esteem/feels elite/morally superior

There’s a pressure to conform

The decision/s appear to be unanimous

Some group members may be censoring themselves if they privately disagree

Illusion of invulnerability (“There won’t be consequences!”)

The group underestimates opponents

Foolish Committees

Stasser and Titus (1985) were able to demonstrate that committees mostly spend time discussing what they agree on, for the sake of getting along, instead of points of contention

Their methodology

The committee consisted of 7 members

They were deciding whether to hire Anderson or Baker

Each group member received a card with information for him/her

Each member received a card with the same 4 reason to hire Baker, and 1 reason to hire Anderson

But each card had a different reason for why to hire Anderson, so 7 in total

But the groups never caught on that there was a total of 3 more reason to hire Anderson than Baker because everyone was too busy agreeing with each other

Those findings bode poorly for committees, as the whole point is to pool the individual knowledge each member has

The Risky Shift

The tendency for groups to take greater risks than any individual member of the group would have taken

The group discussions lead the group to a more extreme point of view over time

But there was also a ‘stingy shift’ that occurred in studies, toward more conservative decisions

How do we reconcile these two findings?

It turns out that which ever direction a committee was initially leaning, will result in a shift in that direction

This is called group polarization

It is extremely similar to the coherence shifts we covered last class (where people had an initial leaning and then their opinions of the case polarized) but this time it’s on a group level

Leaders and Leadership

A good CEO or leader often adds 14% of the company’s value or 25 million in revenue

Compared to average CEOs

In a case study of 11 successful CEOs, some common traits emerged

Modest & humble

Fierce resolve

Decisive

Competent

Integrity

Vision

Leaders and Leadership

Good leaders succeed at two realms of leaderships

1. Task oriented: sets goals, plans, coordinates, etc.

2. Relationship oriented: takes care of members, resolves conflicts, boosts morale

Unfortunately, narcissists often become leaders (or toxic leaders)

In a study that arranged participants into groups of 4, people who scored highly on the trait of narcissism often emerged as leaders

Leaders and Leadership

Narcissists like to seek attention, have the confidence to speak up, and are assertive

Good leaders have just the right amount of assertiveness though, and not too much

Too much can stifle group morale

Patterns that make for toxic leaders:

1. The leader lacks ability to do the job, may have been promoted without the requisite knowledge

2. Builds a shoddy team due to bad hiring choices

3. Has poor interpersonal skills & is arrogant

E.g. “Do it because I said so!”

Dangerous national leaders

Mayer (1993) reviewed data from past national leaders and found the while most have sound cognitive abilities, their emotional lives are potentially the most important

He identified 3 main criteria that constitute a dangerous leader, with classic examples being Napoleon and Hitler

1. Indifference toward people’s suffering

2. Disregard for criticism

3. Grandiose sense of national entitlement

Leaders and Leadership

Can you think of any leaders of a nation who meet those 3 criteria?

A British nobleman named Lord Acton once said, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”

Some researchers have attempted to test that assertion!

Leaders and leadership

Research by Kipnis (1976):

He made participants managers and gave them either low-power (just worked with the staff, no real difference) or high-power (power to fire, promote, withhold money, etc.)

The staff and their actions were the same/controlled

He found that the managers used completely different strategies

Low-power managers praised workers, gave advice, etc.

High-power managers made threats, ‘threw their weight around’, etc.

Leaders and leadership styles

In general, authoritarian leaders (‘do as I say’) are less successful than autoritative leaders (‘come with me’)

Same goes for authoritarian vs authoritative parenting styles

Explaining to a kid why he must do something is more effective than saying “Because I told you to.”

Authoritarian leaders are the type to throw their power around instead of inspiring their workers

The effects of power

In some situations power can lead to good, in others it can lead to bad

But one thing it almost always leads to is more action being taken

Opposite of that, people in positions of less power have a wait and see mentality

In one study (Galinsky et al, 2003) participants were assigned to be either manager or a worker

Following that activity, they played some blackjack

Managers were more likely to hit (ask for another card), whereas workers were more likely to hold (keep what they had)