Social Influence and Group Processes — Class 12 Psychology

This chapter examines what groups are and how they influence individual behaviour. A group is an organised system of two or more interacting and interdependent individuals who share common motives, role relationships and norms that regulate behaviour. Groups differ from crowds, audiences, mobs and teams. People join groups for security, status, self-esteem, satisfaction of psychological and social needs, goal achievement and access to knowledge and information. Group formation is facilitated by proximity, similarity and common motives and goals. Tuckman described five developmental stages: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Group structure has four elements: roles, norms, status and cohesiveness. Excessive cohesiveness can produce groupthink, where the desire for unanimity overrides realistic appraisal and leads to poor decisions. Groups are of several types: primary and secondary, formal and informal, and ingroup and outgroup, with the ingroup viewed favourably and the outgroup negatively, as shown by Tajfel's minimal group paradigm. Group influence on individual behaviour includes social facilitation (improved performance in the presence of others when individually evaluated) and social loafing (reduced individual effort in collective tasks). Social loafing can be reduced by making contributions identifiable and increasing task importance and group cohesiveness. Group polarisation is the strengthening of a group's initial position after discussion, sometimes leading to extreme decisions.