PSYC 288 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Stanford Prison Experiment, Group Cohesiveness, Assertiveness
Document Summary
Group: two or more people who interact and are interdependent in the sense that their needs and goals cause them to influence each other. Help us resolve ambiguity in the social world. Social roles are shared expectations about how people within the group are supposed to behave. Cost of social roles: a person can temporarily lose their personal identities when they adopt a role. Group cohesiveness: the extent to which the group is bound together and members like one another. As cohesion increases, members are more likely to: Groups tend to be similar in age, sex, and opinions. People do better on simple tasks and worse on complex tasks when: Robert zajonc hypothesized that the presence of others increases arousal, which facilitates dominant (well learned) responses but inhibits performance on difficult tasks. Others cause evaluation apprehension- we are worried about what people will think of us.
