Groups

1
Groups

• 15 June 2004

2
Social Facilitation

• Triplett (1898)
• Cycling individual time trials are worse than
  races against others
• Expt same thing with kids reeling in fishing
  lines
• BUT problem sometimes people do worse in groups
  than alone
• So, social psychology drops social facilitation

3
Social Facilitation 2

• Zajonc (rhymes with science)
• New theory of social facilitation (and
  inhibition) stated in terms of physiological
  arousal and type of task
• Yerkes-Dodson Law

4
Yerkes-Dodson Law
Optimal arousal Difficult task
Optimal arousal Easy task
Performance
Arousal
5
Social Facilitation 3

• Michaels et al. pool-hall expt
• 2 groups of subjects categorized after
  unobtrusive observation (good vs bad players)
• 2 conditions (alone vs audience)
• Good players get better with an audience bad
  players get worse

6
Should you play pool in public?
Shots Made
Alone
With observers
7
Social Facilitation 4

• Why?
• Evaluation apprehension
• Mere presence
• Markus typing experiment
• 2 IVs
• Easy vs hard
• Alone, evaluation apprehension, mere presence
• DV time to type
• This experiment supports both hypotheses

8
Markus Results
Alone Evaluation Apprehension Mere Presence
Name
Name with Digits
Difference
14
7
10
54
63
72
40
56
62
9
Social Loafing 1

• Ringelmann (1880s agriculturalist)
• Coordination loss or loss of motivation?
• Ingham et al (1974) tug-of war study
• 4 conditions
• Subject alone
• Subject 1 confederate
• Subject 2 confederates
• Subject 8 confederates
• Supports lack of motivation hypothesis

130 lbs
118 lbs
106 lbs
102 lbs
10
Social Loafing 2

• Why do people loaf?
• Diffusion of evaluation

VS
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Social Compensation

• Sometimes, people perform harder on team tasks
  than on individual tasks
• Williams Karan butter knife experiment
• 2 IVs
• Confederates effort (hi vs lo)
• Type of evaluation (collective vs coactive)
• DV number of uses subject comes up with
• People engage in social loafing or social
  compensation depending on the type of evaluation
  and how hard they think their partner will work

12
Williams Karan
Coactive Evaluation
Collective Evaluation
13
Groupthink

• What is it?
• Symptoms of it
• How to control it

• "Where all think alike, no one thinks very
  much."      - Walter Lippmann