Group Behavior Part 1

1. Group Behavior Part 1

2. You will be part of a train simulation, find your assigned seat based on your ticket and read the instructions given to your role • Do not share your instructions with anyone else

3. In your journals, reflect on how you felt during the simulation (awkward, uncomfortable, mean, left-out).

4. This was a practice in Ostracism (shun, snub, ignore) • How is the concept of ostracism related to group behavior, conformity, and obedience? • How is ostracism used as a tool in social institutions?

5. Social Facilitation: people behave better when other people are watching them than when they are alone • Evaluation Apprehension: is the concern about the opinion of others

6. Social Loafing: refers to one slacking-off because others in the group are willing/able to compensate • Diffusion of Responsibility: tendency to feel less responsible for accomplishing a task when it is shared amongst group members • Risky Shift: tendency to take greater risks because they are part of a group

7. On a scrap piece of paper answer the following question: • “If you could do anything humanly possible with complete assurance that you would not be detected or held responsible, what would you do?”

8. Social facilitation is the tendency to be aroused by the presence of others; in social loafing the presence of others diminishes feelings of responsibility. Both effects may occur in group situations that foster anonymity and draw attention away from oneself. The result is deindividuation in which people abandon their normal restraints. The outcome may be vandalism, orgies, or riots. Does deindividuation always bring out hostility and aggression? Not necessarily. Have your students imagine themselves as participants in a study by Kenneth Gergen and his associates. The researcher ushers you into a chamber that is either fully lighted or totally dark, except for a tiny red light over the door so that you can find your way out if you want to leave the experiment. He says, “You will be left in the room for no more than an hour with some other people, and there are no rules as to what you should do together. At the end you will leave the room alone and will never meet the other participants.” Then you and seven strangers of both sexes spend the next 60 minutes together. What will happen? In the original experiment participants who spent an hour in a lighted room sat around making light conversation. In contrast, the people in the dark talked less, but about more important things. Ninety percent intentionally touched someone and half hugged another. Very few disliked the experience; in fact, most volunteered to return without pay. Anonymity had released intimacy.

9. Group Behavior Part 2

10. “If you could do anything humanly possible with complete assurance that you would not be detected or held responsible, what would you do?” • David Dodd, professor at the University of Utah, poses the same question to his psychology classes • The most frequent responses were criminal acts (26%), sexual acts (11%), and spying behaviors (11%) • The most common single response was “rob a bank,” which accounted for a hefty 15 percent of all responses • Results revealed that 36 percent of the responses were antisocial, 19 percent nonnormative, 36 percent neutral, and 9 percent prosocial.

11. Our Results

12. Reflection • What concepts learned last class do these findings relate to? How? • Why is it that people are more likely to behave badly when there are no consequences?

13. Group Polarization • Group members usually share similar attitudes • Group Polarization: occurs when group members discuss and act upon those attitudes • Can be positive or negative

14. Group Decision Making • Social Decision Schemes: are rules that govern group decision making • Majority-Wins: situations where there is no right or wrong • Truth-Wins: best option • Two-Thirds-Majority: juries • First-Shift: occurs when a group is deadlocked a someone changes their mind

15. Group Leadership • Authoritarian: leaders exert absolute control • Democratic: leaders encourage group members to express their ideas and make their own decisions • Laissez-Faire: very inactive in decision-making

16. Werewolf Game • In groups of about 8 people you will be playing the Werewolf Game • Pass out the cards to determine roles, there will be 1 seer, 1 werewolf, everyone else is a villager • The seer stays awake the whole time, once everyone goes to sleep the werewolf wakes up and chooses 1 villager to kill, then everyone wakes up and makes a decision as to who the werewolf most likely is and should therefore die