How can groups influence people

This means in as much as there are many people following an indistinct direction, that is what everybody would do, whether they are right or wrong it does not matter to them. The minority has no say over the majority through the lack of boldness to resist peer pressure which causes the majority to subjugate them.

Another conformity experiment was conducted by Jennes , who is the first psychologist to study conformity. His research involves a glass bottle filled with beans. He asked participants individually to estimate the number of beans the bottle contained and then tell them to do a group discussion. Surprisingly, almost all of them changed their guesses to be similar to the group estimate.

All the experiments performed by researchers have explained the tremendous power of group influence. Innes When a person communicates and spends time with others for an extended period, it affects the brain according to Innes. Group influences have infinite advantages that influence people in positive ways.

Peer influence makes people have a sense of belonging through the bond they share. This makes people feel secure especially when the group has a defined purpose and has set goals to achieve. There would be an assurance that people are rooting for you when things go wrong. People feel connected when they are in a group. So, this shows the power of group influence and how a group can impact us positively. A student might think volunteer jobs are not too good because there is no pay attributed therefore, there is no need to do so, seeing others volunteering in organizations and project teams can develop an interest in participating.

Job seekers who have many experiences in the field always obtain jobs faster than someone who has none. Also, when an employer now knows it is volunteer work experience in which there is no pay, this would make some qualities obvious such as hardworking, diligence, and many more, and serve as a piece of evidence. In a resume, people write all their qualities but, the volunteer work experiences would show the evidence.

Group influence is advantageous for example, if a group values living healthy, an individual will be encouraged to also live healthy by eating healthy food and being physically fit through exercise. Group influence makes people feel free to share their ideas, opinions, and views. A beneficial peer group helps people develop good habits. A well-behaved person will attract people and elders in society will be fond of them.

The most outstanding experiment dealt with a comparison of groups under autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire leadership. Emerging out of their experiments is the concept of organisational climate. The term refers to the overall experience of a person of the various psychological influences generated in an organisation. If an individual perceives the organisation as being good, healthy and conducive, the climate is supposed to be supportive, and otherwise as non-supportive.

A very major effort of psychologists is in the direction of identifying characteristics, which would improve organisational climates which, in mm, will improve performance and the satisfaction of employees.

Very often it has been found that organisations perform at a very low level of efficiency in spite of having competent workers, sound technology and all the other material resources. The obvious inadequacy lies in the organisational climate. It is wrong to hurt people and their property. The real or imagined pressure of others usually results in us following the group social norms, not going against them.

Violating norms is extremely difficult and done rarely by most of us. We learned above that we need the group to survive, feel good about ourselves, etc. This study, if you remember from the discussion above, had participants wearing a disguise to create anonymity and show that people will be more likely to engage in the antinormative behavior of shocking more than when they were identifiable.

This anonymity should result in increased antinormative behavior, which in this study is shocking another human. It is expected that both of these conditions will lead you to shock more than the condition where you are identifiable.

This again is in line with the classic deindividuation theory. The results found only a small increase in shocking from the KKK-like clothes and then, surprisingly, the nurses went in the other direction and shocked less compared to our control condition. They were more prosocial in their behavior. What does this tell us? What does it mean? It means that it is possible that we found these findings based on situational, local group norms.

Nurses are supposed to help so it triggers a norm of not hurting. It is possible that by placing a nametag on the participant wearing the uniform that it made the group salient for them and made them consider the norms associated with the group, possibly norms of aggression. So, again, just following the social norms of the salient group. They suggested that the setup of these studies and real life situations where we combine anonymity, the closeness of the group and group immersion, actually makes the group importance and norms stronger for the person.

The one shared aspect with classical deindividuation is the focus on anonymity. They see anonymity from immersion in the group to reduce self-awareness and make group identity more salient Reicher et al. The most robust finding was that the conditions of anonymity, larger groups and reduced self-awareness which from classic deindividuation theory, should result in anti-normative behavior actually resulted in greater conformity to the situational norms.

So, we are seeing a specific form of social regulation and not the breakdown of regulations as previously thought. If I had made certain group norms salient, would it change how you responded to the initial prompt.

For example, family, being male or female, being a student, or parent, etc.? What do you think? Would your answer change? The first group situation we will examine deals with group decision making.

Do groups help us make good or bad decisions? What are the group conditions that lead to better decision making? Some of the most important decisions in our lives are made by powerful people in groups.

Currently, our government and judicial system both federally and locally are making decisions that will impact your lives. If you are a member of the United Methodist Church, they just made a decision to not support homosexuality in their clergy or members. Was this a good decision or bad decision? Some of the most popular examples used with groupthink are ones where history clearly demonstrates the rightness or wrongness, even though at the time, it might have been ambivalent.

For example, Pearl Harbor was the result of a poor group decision with a leader who clearly underestimated the Japanese ability to bomb the United States. However, some political decisions may not be determined to be poor right away — it might take time to see the effects. Irving Janis was inspired by decisions made by presidents and their advisors to propose the theory of groupthink. Specifically, those that went horribly wrong.

He set out to find a theory that could help us understand this poor decision making. As you may have noted in the research module, most psychological theory comes from empirical studies results and these together either create the theory or will, after the fact, support the theory that is presented.

In fact, even with limited empirical support, there are more than citations of this theory and it is discussed in a variety of fields, business, psychology, political science and communication.

There are even interventions that are designed to prevent it Esser, Janis proposed that groupthink occurred when group members suppressed dissent toward a poor decision because of a set of antecedent conditions.

There are no published studies to support these first two interpretations. There are also three different ways that researchers have suggested we think about the model of groupthink.

First, one researcher thinks it is time to reject and get rid of the theory. The second way to think about groupthink is to fix and possibly rethink the model. For example, Kramer believes that we should be considering the motivation to maintain political power while examining these group decisions as well as some of the other antecedents, but removing others. The first interacting group situation we examined looked at how a group impacts our decision making.

Groupthink demonstrated how a group leader can assert a group norm, biasing the content of discussion and preventing dissent from the group members. This section will focus primarily on group discussion in general.

What are the possible effects of talking with like-minded others? Most us of probably think this sounds nice. Remember, so far we have learned that we exist in a subjective reality, searching for frameworks to guide us, and choosing to surround ourselves with similar others.

We have discussed, but not formally this is done in module 12 on attraction , that we prefer similar others because liking people similar to us makes us feel that the way we see the world is the right or correct way.

You can probably think of times you gathered with people like you: groups in the college, church groups, political groups, working moms, first time moms, etc. What was the result of meeting with these people? You probably felt better about your reality, but did it change an attitude or perspective that you had prior to entering the group? Researchers found that when others sharing the same perspective are put into a group and left to discuss, they will move to a more extreme opinion from their initial opinion.

The original work in this area was completed by a graduate student at MIT, Stoner was testing the common belief that a group would be riskier than an individual.

It was the work by Moscovici and Zavalloni that started the support for the idea that what mattered was the attitudes and opinions of the group to start with. For example, if the group had a cautious attitude to start with instead of risky, they would become more cautious and not more risky, if they had a positive attitude toward cats, they would like them more at the end of the experiment examining people with positive cat attitudes. An even more interesting finding is that people are unaware that this polarization is happening or has happened.

Groups discussing with other like-minded individuals whether President Obama or President Bush was a better president became more extreme in their attitudes and when asked they misremembered ever having a less extreme attitude Keating et al. What are the psychological processes that underlie and explain our tendency to become more extreme? Informational influence is at work here. Instead of an ambiguous situation though, we have group members who share the same attitude or opinion, and they are presenting arguments and reasons for why they feel the way they do.

This information is collected by each group member and adds to the reasons that are already held to support their opinion. Remember, normative influence is why we are concerned about social approval.

This group contains members who share our views, they are like us, and will likely be seen as in-group members with greater likeability. As a result, we believe it is important to be a good group member and through social comparison looking to others to see how we fit we will want to move our attitude in the direction that is acceptable to the group. Obviously, there are real-world dangers to this effect. If people are only surrounding themselves with like-minded individuals, they are likely to become more extremist in their ideas.

This could account for the political tribalism we see today. It is very easy to only surround yourself with like-minded others, especially with the social-networking sites that are available. This is reflected in fewer bipartisan efforts. What are some other real-world issues that are currently being affected by group polarization? What do you think we can do to reduce this? Could spending time talking to moderate others help move you more toward the middle? Group influence research has a long history.

Starting in the late s, it is some of the first research we did in psychology. The long history gives us great examples of how theories change and morph through time. Social facilitation shows how a theory can be revitalized 40 years after research stops when someone comes up with a solution to the problems found.

This is science and there is always hope that we can get closer to the truth behind human behavior as we perfect our science and move through time. This is true of the study of deindividuation and groupthink as well, with groupthink having much further to go as a supported theory. Social loafing and group polarization are much more straightforward, but the ever changing online world provides new ways to investigate these phenomena. The next module takes the foundations laid from attitudes, persuasion, conformity and group influence to help us better understand the processes of stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination.

Skip to content Module Overview So far, we have seen the influence of the message on our attitudes and behavior, the power of the situation to result in conformity and this module is going to take it to the next level and examine how groups impact the individual.

Module Outline 8. The What and Why of Groups 8. Clarify the effects of social attention through classic social facilitation and current work looking beyond classic social facilitation. Contrast social loafing and free riding. Describe the work on groupthink. Define group polarization. Discuss why groups are important to us. What constitutes a Group?

Do they represent a group? Why are Groups Important to Us? Describe the loss of motivation from presence of groups. Clarify the processes of deindividuation through the classic and alternative explanations.