Social Psychology - group productivity and decision making

Norman triplett's 1898

• school children worked in two conditions: alone vs in pairs
• http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Triplett/

Zajonc 1965 - drive theory of social facilitation

• the precence of others automatically produces arousal, which 'drives' dominant responses
• performance is improved by a 'correct' dominant response, but it is impaired but an 'incorrect' dominant response
• precence of others - arousal - increase in performing dominant responses - if correct - social facillition
• precence on others - arousal - increase in performing dominant responses - in incorrect - social inhibition

Markus 1978

• paricipants dressed in their own clothing (easy task) or in unfimiliar clothing (difficult task)
• they dressed either alone, with an incidental audience present or with an attentive audience present
• evaluation apprehension occured on the easy tak, only the attentive audience reduced the time taken to dress
• there was a drive effect on the difficult task, both incidental and attentive audiences increased the time taken to dress compared to alone

Ringelmann 1913 

• force per person as a function of group size
• as the number of people pulling horizontally (tug of war) on a rope increased, each persons exertation was reduced: people pulling in eight persons groups each exert half the effort as of a person pulling alone

Latane, Williams and Harkins 1979 - social loafing

• shouting, cheering, clapping
• alone vs groups of 2, 4 and 6
• noise produced by person reduced by:
• 29% in two person groups
• 49% in four person groups
• 60% in six person groups
• people were matchng to standered
• induviduals shouted les loudly as group size increased

Brainstorming

• facilitates creative thinking
• groups generate more ideas (say what comes to mind, be non-critical)
• but individuals no more creatove in brainstorming groups than on their own (Stroebe and Diehl1994)
• factors that affect inferior performance in brainstorming groupps: evaluation apprehension; social loafing; production matching; production blocking (can be remedied by electroning brainstorming and…