Social Influence and Group Processes

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Psychology Class XII (Psychology), Chapter 7.

Why do you pull harder alone than in a team?

Picture a tug of war. Ten people hold the rope, and everyone is shouting. Is each person pulling as hard as they would if the rope depended on them alone? Research says most people quietly pull a little less. And here is a second puzzle. A class discussion begins with most students mildly in favour of something, and ends with everyone strongly in favour, with louder and more extreme opinions than anyone started with. Groups do not just add up individuals. They change what individuals do and think. This chapter explains how.

What is a group?

A group is an organised system of two or more individuals who are interacting and interdependent, who have common motives, who have a set of role relationships among members, and who have norms that regulate members' behaviour. A group usually gives its members support and comfort, and helps their growth as individuals.

Groups have these salient characteristics.

Not every collection of people is a group. A family, a class and a playgroup are groups. The following are not, or are special cases.

Teams and groups are not the same thing.

Pause and predict: thousands of spectators at a stadium cheer together, but none of them has a defined role or depends on the others. Is that a group?

Check your answer: no. The football team on the field is a group, with roles, goals and interdependence. The spectators are an audience, a collection of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time. If an audience turns impulsive and acts in a common direction, it becomes a mob.

Why people join groups

Different groups satisfy different needs, so we belong to many groups at once. Sometimes this causes competing demands, but most of the time we manage them.

How groups form

Group formation begins with contact and some interaction, which is made easier by three conditions.

Stages of group formation: Tuckman's model

Groups develop. You do not become a member the moment people come together. Tuckman proposed five developmental stages.

The stages in one line: forming → storming → norming → performing → adjourning.

Why it matters. Groups do not always move neatly from one stage to the next. Several stages can go on at once, groups may go back and forth, and some skip stages. Think of a class project team. Arguments about who does what (storming) are not a failure. They are a stage that, once resolved, leads to clear roles and shared rules.

Group structure: four elements

As members interact, regular patterns appear in how tasks are distributed, what responsibilities are assigned and how much prestige members have. This is group structure.

Cohesiveness is useful, but too much can be harmful. That leads to the next topic.

Groupthink

Teamwork usually helps. But Irving Janis suggested that cohesion can interfere with effective leadership and lead to disastrous decisions. In groupthink, a group's concern for unanimity overrides the motivation to realistically appraise courses of action. Decision makers become irrational and uncritical.

Groupthink is marked by the appearance of consensus: each member believes everyone agrees, and no one voices a dissenting opinion because they think it would damage cohesion and make them unpopular. Such groups have an exaggerated sense of their own power to control events and tend to ignore or minimise warning signs from the real world. To preserve harmony, they become increasingly out of touch with reality.

Everyday example: a friend group planning a trip. Everyone thinks the plan is risky, but each assumes the others are happy with it and nobody says so. Only after problems appear does it become clear that most people had doubts.

Pause and predict: a student council always votes unanimously, never invites outside opinions and has never changed a plan once decided. Which phenomenon is it at risk of, and what is one fix?

Check your answer: groupthink. Homogeneous, cohesive and isolated groups with no tradition of considering alternatives are the most at risk. A fix is to reward disagreement, ask for alternative plans or invite an outside person to evaluate the decision.

Types of groups

Groups differ in size, duration and organisation, so psychologists classify them in three pairs.

Ingroup and outgroup perceptions affect our social lives. The textbook reminds us that these categories are created by us and are not real, and that in some cultures plurality is celebrated, as it is in India, with its composite culture seen in art, architecture and music.

The minimal group paradigm. Henri Tajfel and colleagues asked how little is needed for intergroup behaviour. British schoolboys expressed their preference for paintings by two artists, Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and were told they belonged to the Kandinsky group or the Klee group. Members' identity was hidden using code numbers. The children then distributed money between recipients known only by code number and group membership. The groups were created on a flimsy criterion with no past and no future, yet children favoured their own group.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Tajfel's minimal group paradigm shows that even a trivial basis for dividing people leads to ingroup favouritism. In reality: this finding was a starting point for Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory, which proposes that part of our self concept comes from the groups we belong to, and that we gain self esteem by seeing our own group favourably. Why it matters: it links this chapter to the idea of social identity that also appears in discussions of prejudice.

How groups influence individuals

The chapter looks at two situations: an individual performing alone in the presence of others (social facilitation), and an individual performing along with others as part of a larger group (social loafing).

Social facilitation. The presence of others raises arousal and can motivate people to perform better, if they are already good at the task. This improvement occurs when each person's efforts are individually evaluated.

Social loafing. Suppose efforts are pooled so that only the group's performance is seen. Then individuals work less hard than when alone. Social loafing is a reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task, one in which outputs are pooled with those of other members. Tug of war is an example, as it is impossible to see how much force each member exerts, so people can relax and become "free riders".

Latané and his associates asked groups of male students to clap or cheer as loudly as possible, alone or in groups of two, four and six. As the group grew, total noise rose but each person's noise fell.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: social facilitation means better performance when others are present, if the person is good at the task and is individually evaluated; social loafing means less individual effort in pooled tasks. In reality: social psychologists note that the same presence of others can also make a beginner perform worse, because arousal tends to strengthen well learned responses and weaken newly learned ones. That is why you may sing confidently in front of friends but stumble over a new song. Why it matters: it shows social facilitation depends on how well you know the task.

Group polarisation. Important decisions are made by groups, and groups are more likely to take extreme decisions than individuals alone. Group polarisation is the strengthening of the group's initial position as a result of group interaction and discussion. Whatever the starting position, it becomes stronger after discussion, which may be dangerous when groups take extreme positions. Example: a group of colleagues deciding the punishment for an employee caught taking a bribe may decide to let the person go free or to terminate their services instead of imposing a proportionate punishment.

There are three reasons for it, illustrated with a discussion on capital punishment among like minded people.

Two views. For the exam: group polarisation makes a group's initial position stronger after discussion, and groups are more likely to take extreme decisions than individuals. Another reading: researchers also point out that the shift goes in the direction the group already leans, so a group that begins cautious can become more cautious, and a group that begins in favour of risk can take bigger risks. The same three reasons are often used to explain why online groups of like minded people can harden each other's views.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Attitude and Social Cognition explains attitudes and prejudice, and its closing sections on social identity and ingroup bias lead straight into ingroup and outgroup here.
• Related: Meeting Life Challenges shows how social support from groups buffers stress. Self and Personality covers self concept, which groups shape through social identity.
• Class XI link: What is Psychology introduces social psychology as one of the branches that studies behaviour in social settings.