Groups & social identity

In the presence of others, we act differently

• Social loafing: reduction of efforts in the presence of others (Latane et al, 1979; Karau & Williams, 1993). Additive tasks - product is sum or combination of individual efforts
• Social facilitation (Zajonc et al, 1969): increase of efforts in the presence of others. Arousal, distraction. If we feel we're good at the task, presence of others increaces performance, if not, it decreases performance

Deindividuation: loosening of normal constraints on behaviour when people can't be identified (such as when they're in a crowd) leading to an increase in impulsive acts. This makes people feel less accountable for their actions - reduces likelihood of being singled out and blamed. It makes information processing more difficult, and increases likelihood of informative and normative social influence. Johnson & Downing (1979) 2(KKK vs nurse) x 2(mask or no mask) - assigned people to dress like a KKK member or a nurse, and assigned people to wear mask or no mask. Those who wore masks (deindividuated) and in KKK costume delivered higher shocks to another person, but delivered less if in nurse uniform.

• Group: when more than two people who define themselves as a group different from other groups (Dasgupta et al, 1999)
• A need to belong to groups probably has an evolutionary basis (Brewer & Caporael, 2006), connectedness to others is one of the most basic motivations (Diener & Oishi, 2005)
• Individuals are affected by processes that occur in groups
• Common bond groups: each member is related and bonded to another, involves face-to-face interaction (e.g gangs, friendship groups, task or hobby groups)
• Common identity groups: members linked together via category and in-group identification (e.g nationality, race/ethnicity, gender)
• Cohesiveness: how tight, homogenous and united the group is, how much solidarity and cooperation there is among members
• Hierarchy: group members differ in terms of their rank and status within the group. Lower status group members adhere to group norms more (Jetten et al, 2006)
• Entitativity (Leyens et al, 1999): extent to which groups are reified, perceived as coherent wholes, entities
• Essentialism (Haslam et al, 2000): group members defined by the same underlying unchangeable essence, all group members share the same substance

Groups have norms: implicit rules that inform people of what is expected of them. Feeling norms - expectations of emotions that are appropriated to express depending on situations (Hochschild, 1983). Groups also define roles. Members are expected to act in certain ways depending on their position in a group (e.g Stanford prison experiment: random assignment to different roles changed people's behaviour but this depended on how much they identified with the role).

Benefits to being in groups

• Self-knowledge and self-esteem: helps us define our identity and buttress self-esteem (Tajfel & Turner, 1986)
• Self-enhancement: boosting one's own public image via identifying with groups of high social status (Roccas, 2003)
• Helps us achieve goals we couldn't achieve alone
• Politicised collective identity: identifying with social groups that share grievances and engage in power struggle to achieve common goals (Simon & Klandermans, 2001)
• Most important decisions in the world today are made by groups - it is assumed that groups make better decisions than individuals. In general, groups will do better than individuals if they rely on the person with the most expertise and are stimulated by each other's comments

Groupthink: "mode of thinking that people engage in when they're deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise an alternative course of action" (Janis, 1972). Fault decision-making in a highly cohesive group. Groups do not consider all alternatives and they desire unanimity at the expense of quality decisions; occurs when groups are highly cohesive and when they're under considerable pressure to make a quality decision.

Antecedents of groupthink: isolated, cohesive, directive leader, stress
Symptoms of groupthink: squashing dissent, rationalising belief in moral correctedness, illusion of invulnerability and unanimity
Defective decision making: failure to examine alternatives, incomplete information search, failure to examine risks

Bay of pigs: Invasion of April 1961, primary case study Janis used to formulate his theory of groupthink. When some people attempted to present their objections to the plan, the Kennedy team as a whole ignored these objections and kept believing in the morality of their plan.

Group polarisation: tendency for a group to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of its members. A group's attitude toward a situation may change in the sense that individual's initial attitudes have strengthened and intensified after group discussion. (Moscovici & Zavalloni, 1969): examined French student's attitudes toward Americans (negative) and toward de Gaulle (positive). Attitudes toward Americans became more negative after discussion, and attitudes toward de Gaulle became more positive after the discussion.

Mechanisms of polarisation: 

• Social comparison: people learn about and assess themselves by comparison with others
• Social influence: people want to appear desirable
• Persuasive argument theory: people weigh pros and cons arguments they remember; they give each other new arguments for the group tendency

Self-categorisation theory: describes the circumstances under which a person will perceive collections of people (including themselves) as a group, as well as the consequences of perceiving people in group terms.

The self can be categorised on various levels of abstraction (Turner, 1999): personal(self as an individual), social(self as member of organisation or team member), and human (self as human being). The lowest level of abstraction is given as a personal self, where the perceiver self categorises as "I". A higher level of abstraction corresponds to a social self, where the perceiver self categorises as "we".

Depersonalisation: the process whereby people categorise the self in terms of a particular social group, rather than as an inidivual. When this happens, people see themselves less in terms of their unique characteristics, and more in terms of the social groups to which they believe that they belong (this involves a shift from "I" to "we")

Social categorisation: self-stereotypisation and accentuation of differences between categories and similarities within out-group homogeneity and in-group favouritism

Self-stereotyping: a tendency to see oneself as close to a group prototype (Spears, Doosje & Ellemers, 1997).

Accentuation: as category memberships become salient there will be a tendency to exaggerate the differences on critical dimensions between individuals falling into distinct categories and to minimise these difference within each of these categories - Turner (1982)

Out-group homogeneity: tendency to see members of groups different from their own as more similar than they actually are (Park & Rothbart, 1982)

Intergroup behaviour: perception, cognition and behaviour influenced by people's recognition that they and others are members of distinct social categories; behaviour influenced by social groups that people belong to and relationships between these groups.