Social Psychology Of Group Processes Research Paper

1. What Is A Group?

There is, however, little agreement on a social psychological definition of the group (see Hogg and Abrams 1988). The dominant view (since Floyd Allport in the early 1920s) is that a group is a collection of individuals, and that group processes are actually individual or interpersonal processes among a number of people. For instance, Latane’s social impact theory attributes differences between interpersonal and group behavior to, among other things, the effects of increasing numbers of people. An alternative perspective (see Hogg and Abrams 1988) is that groups and group behavior are qualitatively distinct from individuals and interpersonal behavior, and that different or additional concepts are needed to properly analyze groups—for example, groups produce norms that regulate members’ behavior and people reconfigure their self-concept so that it is defined in terms of properties of the group as a collective. This perspective is represented by the early work of Wundt and Durkheim (late nineteenth century), and McDougall and Mead (early twentieth century), the more recent work of Sherif and Tajfel, and presently by social identity theory and intergroup approaches. It is argued that the analysis of groups in terms only of interpersonal processes is reductionist—it does not adequately address questions to do with group processes, but instead deals only with interpersonal processes among more than two people.

The issue of ‘what is a group’ continues to simmer as an important, and unresolved, metatheoretical debate in social psychology. Many researchers adhere to one view or the other, for example, perspectives that focus on the interdependence of individuals in small face-to-face aggregates vs. perspectives that focus on the collective self-concept that derives from membership of groups of all sizes. Others opt out of the formal controversy—this is particularly true of an increasing number of scholars who research group processes from more applied perspectives (e.g., sport psychology). In recent years, however, there have been promising attempts to integrate interactive small group perspectives, intergroup perspectives, and cognitive self-concept perspectives (see Brown 2000).

2. Studying Group Processes

Traditionally the study of group processes has lain at the heart of social psychology. It was in many ways the explosion in the late 1940s and early 1950s of research into what was then called group dynamics that set experimental social psychology off on its current expansion. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, early group dynamics researchers like Kurt Lewin and Leon Festinger have significant impact on the discipline. Group processes research thrived until about the mid-1960s when it suffered a fairly rapid decline in popularity (replaced by attribution theories, then social cognition), from which it is showing strong signs of recovery, mainly through cognitive and intergroup perspectives on group processes (Moreland et al. 1994). The apparent demise of traditional group processes research may be due to a variety of factors (Steiner 1974). For instance: (a) it is time consuming and costly to conduct research with interactive groups; (b) data from group research are rarely neat, tidy, and easily explained; (c) the computer revolution shifted social psychological interest from the study of groups to the development of theories of individual human behavior that resembled computer software; and (d) the logical end-point of reductionist perspectives on group processes is to focus exclusively on individual psychology.

3. Group Formation, Commitment, And Identity

A central concept in the study of group processes is ‘group cohesiveness,’ which refers to the overall solidarity of groups, their ‘groupness,’ and the process that transforms an aggregate of unrelated individuals into a psychological group. Through cooperative interdependence in the pursuit of shared goals, people become attracted to one another, to the group, and to the group’s goals. In this way a group forms, and its overall cohesiveness is an arithmetic combination of individual members’ attraction to one another and the group. This attraction-to-group—or interpersonal attraction—analysis has not gone unchallenged, and recent perspectives place an emphasis on some form of commitment to group, or self-definition in terms of group membership (Hogg 1992). For instance, social identity theory does not consider attraction-to-group to be the basic process of group formation, but rather one of a range of consequences of a process of identification with the group (i.e., self-categorization in terms of the group’s defining features—see Social Identity, Psychology of). Moreland and Levine (e.g. 1994) have developed a ‘group socialization model’ to address what they consider to be a lack of diachronic perspective in many models of group formation and development. Commitment is considered the most basic process. People become committed to a group, and a group to its members, through bilateral cost- benefit analyses of membership in this group relative to other groups. As mutual commitment rises or ebbs, members move in and out of different general roles within the group (e.g., new member, ‘oldtimer’)—a process characterized by role transitions that are quite marked, and which can involve public rites of passage.

4. Group Influence

Groups influence the attitudes and behaviors of their members in many different ways (e.g., Turner 1991).

4.1 Direct Influence And Persuasion

Direct influence attempts involve individuals, subgroups, or the group as a whole trying to persuade members (e.g., deviants, dissenters) to go along with or come into line with the group. Persuasion attempts may range from relatively polite requests all the way to direct orders backed up by threats and ultimately force. Persuasion is generally more effective if the source of influence has a degree of legitimate authority and power within the group (see Chemers 2001). Direct influence generally produces behavioral compliance which is not necessarily matched by underlying cognitive or attitudinal change—people go along with the group for instrumental reasons which may include a desire to be evaluated favorably or to avoid disapproval or punishment.

4.2 Indirect Influence And Group Norms

Groups can also influence members indirectly through the power of social norms that describe and prescribe appropriate behavior for group members in that context (Brown 2000, Turner 1991). In the absence of direct social pressure people conform to group norms. This may happen through ‘normative influence,’ in which people simply publicly comply in order to obtain social approval or avoid disapproval from others—there is no underlying cognitive change. Another process is ‘informational influence’ which produces true conformity—underlying cognitive change which may go along with behavioral change. Informational influence is effective where people are uncertain about the objective correctness of their beliefs, and in the absence of objective criteria they use group members’ behaviors as social criteria (Festinger 1954). A third process is ‘referent informational influence’ in which people who identify with a group construct a contextually appropriate norm that defines the in-group in contrast to relevant outgroups, and then enact the norm as an automatic consequence of self-categorization.

Although indirect group influence usually comes from the in-group, there are at least two ways in which an outgroup can have influence: (a) outgroups influence the nature of the in-group norm that people conform to, and (b) minority outgroups can adopt strategies to convert people to their viewpoint (e.g., by promulgating a consistent and consensual viewpoint, and by presenting themselves as actually part of the in-group)—see Social Movements: Psychological Perspectives.

5. Group Structure

Whereas norms and social influence processes tend to produce uniformity within groups, other factors introduce unevenness and variability across the group that structures the group into different regions. Aspects of group structure can surface through intragroup patterns of who prefers or likes whom, known as ‘sociometric choice’ (see Hogg 1992).

5.1 Roles

Groups usually embrace a number of different roles that can be occupied by different people, or by subgroups of people. Roles prescribe behavior, and they emerge to assist the group to function better as an integrated entity. According to Moreland and Levine’s (1994) group socialization model, the group socialization process involves people moving in and out of quite distinct general roles within the group as a function of commitment to the group. Roles are rarely equal—some are more desirable than others, and have more power, prestige, and status attached to them. In this way, groups are often internally structured into role hierarchies. High status roles tend to be occupied by people who have specific status characteristics (abilities and skills directly related to the group’s function) and/or diffuse status characteristics (they are members of social categories that have high status in society at large)—see Ridgeway 2001.

5.2 Communication Structures

Another feature of group structure is the ease with which members or role occupants can communicate with one another (see Baron et al. 1992). Depending on the group’s task, different communication structures can emerge—highly centralized structures channel all communication through a single communication hub (often the leader), while less centralized networks allow freer communication among all members. The nature of the communication network affects group functioning, task performance, member satisfaction, and group solidarity. For instance, highly centralized networks can, under certain circumstances, reduce efficiency, cause peripheral members to feel excluded and dissatisfied, and even reduce group cohesion. Communication networks can be traced and described using Bales’s ‘interaction process analysis’ method, which documents who communicates what with whom, and how often.

5.3 Leadership

One of the most important, and certainly the highest status, role in a group is the role of leader (Chemers 2001). Research on leadership suggests that effective leadership (often defined in terms of the ability to motivate members to internalize and act on one’s own innovative vision for the group) is an interaction between leadership style and the type of leader that is needed in a particular situation. Another factor that may be important in some circumstances is that the leader is perceived to be a good group member who closely fits the defining features of membership. Because leadership is a role, leadership dynamics involve followers—if followers will not be led then the leader cannot lead. Generally, followers tend to endorse leaders who have good leadership qualities, who have abilities that benefit and promote the group as a whole, and who are good group members or have been good group members in the past. These attributes encourage followers to endow the leader with status and to allow the leader to be innovative.

5.4 Deviance

Whereas leaders are at the pinnacle of the intragroup role hierarchy, deviants are at the bottom (see Hogg and Tindale 2001). Research suggests that groups try very hard to socialize marginal members by making them conform or by finding them useful and valued roles within the group. If these attempts fail, people evaluatively reject deviants, often pathologizing their behavior and attempting to classify them as outgroup members. Research on the ‘black sheep effect’ suggests that because marginal members pose a threat to the normative integrity of the group and thus threaten members’ group membership-based self-concept, marginal in-group members are actually disliked even more than an identical person who belongs to an outgroup.

6. Group Performance

Since groups often exist to perform specific tasks, an important question to ask is whether groups perform better or worse than individuals (see Baron et al. 1992). This is an extension of an even more fundamental question about how individual task performance is affected by the presence of others. Coactors or a passive audience tend to improve performance of a well-learned or easy task, but impede performance of a poorly learned or difficult task. In general, however, groups are interactive entities, and the question becomes one of whether the task is better accomplished by interaction in a group, or simply by individuals working alone. The answer to this question is that it depends on the specific nature of the task—for instance, more cars can be produced by a group effort based on a coordinated division of labour, than by individuals building them from scratch.

6.1 Social Loafing, Free Riding, And Social Dilemmas

Groups often perform less well than would be suggested by the sum of the abilities or performances of individual members (see Moreland and Levine 1994). This can be because of coordination losses, that is, interference between individuals trying to coordinate their actions within the group. Coordination losses may be one explanation of why group brainstorming is often a suboptimal way to generate novel ideas in a group. Groups can also perform less well because of motivation losses, that is, people in groups put in less effort because they are less motivated. This latter ‘social loafing’ effect seems to be partly due to a reduction in perceived personal identifiability and responsibility in the group, and can be explained in terms of ‘social impact theory.’ Social loafing can be reduced by, among other things, task importance, enjoyment, and relevance, and increased group cohesiveness and personal identifiability. Related to loafing is a tendency for individuals in a group confronted by a scarce resource to free ride, that is, maximize their own shortterm gains with little regard for the group as a whole and thus their long-term gains. Many of the environmental problems faced by the world today are examples of social dilemmas. Social dilemmas can be (partly) avoided by having a leader manage a resource rather than letting the members compete directly, or by having members identify strongly with the group that accesses the resource.

7. Deindividuation, Collective Protest, And The Crowd

A common assumption about groups is that they cause people to lose their sense of individuality and that this leads to low motivation, lack of responsibility, and antisocial conduct—all captured by the notion of ‘deindividuation’ (Zimbardo 1970). Historically, this perspective, which has its critics (see Postmes and Spears 1998), is most evident in research on a particular type of group—the crowd. Starting with LeBon in the late nineteenth century, social psychologists have generally considered crowds to be irrational and antisocial because members of the crowd are deindividuated. A contrasting perspective is one that views crowd behavior as social protest. Crowds have a purpose that is tied to a specific identity, and so crowd behavior has a logic to it because it is tightly regulated by the context relevant norms of the group. Where a crowd engages in antisocial acts, this is because the event is an expression of protest against a dominant group—the protest takes the form of violation of the dominant group’s norms and rules.

8. Group Decision Making

One of the most common tasks that groups perform is decision making (Baron et al. 1992). Group decision making is potentially superior to individual decision making because in a group there is a larger pool of expertise, viewpoints, and so forth. Groups may come to decisions slowly, but this may be a good thing, particularly for complex issues, because it indicates proper consideration of all facets of the issue. However, groups are also subject to an array of group processes that may impair decision making, for example, factional conflict, biased leadership, and pressures to be obedient and compliant.

8.1 Groupthink And Group Polarization

One potential problem is the tendency for highly cohesive decision-making groups, that are under stress and do not have impartial leadership, to engage in ‘groupthink,’ a mode of thinking in which the desire to reach unanimous agreement overrides the motivation to adopt proper, rational group decision-making procedures. Groupthink involves defective decision-making procedures, which generally produce poor decisions that can have disastrous consequences. Many poor-quality crisis decisions made by governments have been attributed to groupthink, for example, the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. Another potential bias in group decision making is ‘group polarization’ (see Turner 1991). This is a tendency for group discussion to cause groups to come to a decision that is more extreme than the mean of the individual members’ prediscussion opinions. Polarization occurs only when the prediscussion mean already tends to favor one pole of the decision-making dimension—the group decision is then more extreme in this direction.

8.2 Social Combination Models

A major focus of research on group decision making concerns how one can predict a group decision from the initial distribution of members’ views (Baron et al. 1992, Hogg and Tindale 2001). A number of social combination models have been derived to relate the distribution of initial opinions in a decision-making group to the final group decision. The most enduring of these is Davis’s social decision schemes model (Davis 1973, which identifies at least five implicit (or explicit) decision rules that can exist in groups (e.g., unanimity, majority wins, truth wins). Different rules tend to prevail for tasks in which there is a demonstrably correct solution (‘intellective tasks’) as opposed to tasks which are more a matter of taste and preference (‘judgemental tasks’). Rules also differ in terms of how strict they are (i.e., how much intragroup agreement is called for), and how much power concentration they have (i.e., how much power is located in one individual). Unanimity is very strict but low on power concentration, while two-thirds majority is less strict but has greater power concentration. Strictness and power concentration have effects on satisfaction within the group, and on the speed with which a group makes a decision. Social combination models are often tested using a simulated jury paradigm.

8.3 Group Remembering

Group decision making usually involves collaborative recall of information, or group remembering (Baron et al. 1992, Hogg and Tindale 2001). Group remembering is not simply a retrieval activity in the pursuit of veridical recall, rather it is a constructive process where social comparisons among group members shape the resultant group memory. As such, group remembering may be subject to implicit or even intentional bias. Another feature of group remembering is ‘transactive memory.’ Groups often need to bring a large amount of information to bear upon a decision, and thus they develop a differentiated memory structure where individuals or subgroups specialize in different memory domains. Where this occurs people not only have to remember their own part of the puzzle, but they also need to know who specializes in what memories—they develop a transactive memory structure. Research shows that group functioning and decision making is compromised where people have not acquired a transactive memory, or where such a system has not developed in the group.

8.4 Intergroup Decision Making

Decision-making groups can contain factional rifts, or can be considered to be interactive decision-making contexts in which opposing groups or their representatives come together to reach an agreement. Under these circumstances the group provides a context for intergroup decision making. Because individuals are acting as group representatives rather than individuals, face-to-face intergroup bargaining has a relatively low probability of success—intransigence and stalemate is more likely. Third party mediation can help, and as a last resort, so can arbitration (in which a settlement is imposed by a third party).

9. The Intergroup Dimension

The study of group processes has tended to focus on what happens among members of small interactive groups (e.g., Levine and Moreland 1998, Moreland and Levine 1994), and does not fully consider how relations between groups may influence these processes. There are, however, indications that an intergroup perspective may be useful in helping to understand intragroup processes (Brown 2000, Hogg and Abrams 1988). For instance, group polarization may be an intergroup phenomenon in which a relatively extreme in-group differentiates itself from a less extreme outgroup by becoming even more extreme. Group decision making may sometimes actually be intergroup decision making, and the commitment process that underlies group socialization involves an assessment not only of in-group membership but also outgroup memberships. There is also an array of group behaviors that are more properly termed intergroup behaviors: these may include a more favorable evaluation of the in-group, its members, and all it stands for, in relation to outgroups (i.e., ethnocentrism); discriminatory behavior against outgroups and in favor of the in-group; and stereotypic perceptions and assumptions about in-group and outgroup members. Also, the extreme forms of collective behavior that occur in crowds are sometimes best explained in intergroup terms—the crowd is a group with a passion that is guided and fuelled by the group’s opposition to an outgroup (e.g., football supporter groups). Finally, group influence is not purely one-way, with the group bringing dissenters and deviates into line. It is often an intergroup affair with active minorities within the group trying to sway the majority to its own position.

10. Specific Groups

The study of group processes has tended to have numerically small, face-to-face, demographically homogenous, short-lived, task-oriented groups in mind (Steiner 1974). As such, a great deal of research has used four to six-person laboratory groups of university (often psychology) students. In many cases, experimental studies of group processes have used the dyad as the prototypical group. This is based on an assumption that group processes are merely aggregated interpersonal processes. More naturalistic studies have dealt with a great variety of groups— gangs, housing programs, sports teams, summer camps, scout troops, school classes, military groups, therapy groups, juries, government and/organizational decision-making groups, and so forth. Studies in the intergroup tradition have tended to be interested in cognitive processes and so have often, though not exclusively, used rather abstract laboratory experiments where groups are often only nominal and there is no interaction.

11. Future Directions

There has been a marked revival of interest among social psychologists in group processes (Moreland et al. 1994). The key feature of this revival is an integration of intergroup, small group, and social cognitive perspectives in social psychology (see Brown 2000, Hogg and Tindale 2001) that sets a clear course for future developments. Recent developments have, however, tended to focus on generic group processes rather than the phenomenology of specific types of group. Although the study of larger, naturally occurring groups in more naturalistic contexts is time consuming, methodologically problematic, and involves weaker experimental control, future developments in group processes may be assisted by more of this type of research. Indeed there is evidence that although certain group processes may be common to all groups, a full understanding of groups also needs to recognize differences between small interactive groups and large social categories, between groups that vary in the degree to which they are a coherent entity, and between groups as diverse as a family, a sect, a therapy group, an army, a nation, a virtual group, and so forth (Deaux et al. 1995).

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