PSYC 351 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Cockroach, Deindividuation, Groupthink
Chapter 8 Group Influences
❖ Which of these are groups?
Five people waiting at the same corner for a bus?
People attending a worship service?
The Britney Spears Fan Club?
The students in a seminar class?
❖ What is a group?
interact and influence one another (for more than a brief moment)
Interdependence or shared identity (an “us” quality)
❖ What is a collective?
People engaged in common activities or sharing the same space
have minimal direct interaction
❖ Mere presence of others
How does the presence of others affect performance?
Facilitate or hinder? Do we perform better when other people are around us?
❖ Early research was mixed
Triplett (1898) found that children reeled fishing line faster in presence of others.
Other research found that the presence of others hindered learning nonsense syllables,
completing a maze, and performing complex problems.
❖ The cockroach study (Zajonc zy-ence)
− Cockroaches did a maze task
Difficult maze
Easy maze
− Completed with our without “audience”
Alone
With other cockroaches in the stands
− Cockroach performance
In the easy maze condition: Ran the maze faster with an audience present than when alone
In the difficult maze condition: Ran the maze faster alone than with an audience present
❖ Zajonc Solution
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Perform better when other people are around us..
❖ Why?
Mere presence of others
Others present leads directly to arousal
No mediating mechanism
Evaluation apprehension
Presence of others only leads to arousal if they can evaluate us
Fear of negative evaluation leads to arousal
❖ Why?
Distraction
Presence of other leads to social facilitation only when they distract from task and create
attentional conflict
Social Loafing
When your performance is not individually evaluated, will the presence of others hamper or
hinder performance?
It depends
Free Riding
When you know that your contribution to the group cannot be distinguished, people may free-
ride.
Individually observed = evaluation = social facilitation
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
What is a group? interact and influence one another (for more than a brief moment) People engaged in common activities or sharing the same space have minimal direct interaction. Triplett (1898) found that children reeled fishing line faster in presence of others. Other research found that the presence of others hindered learning nonsense syllables, completing a maze, and performing complex problems. In the easy maze condition: ran the maze faster with an audience present than when alone. In the difficult maze condition: ran the maze faster alone than with an audience present. Perform better when other people are around us Presence of others only leads to arousal if they can evaluate us. Presence of other leads to social facilitation only when they distract from task and create attentional conflict. When you know that your contribution to the group cannot be distinguished, people may free- ride. Lost in crowd = no evaluation = social loafing.
