OVERVIEW READINGS

EDP 5285 GROUP PROCESSES GUIDE 1:  INTRODUCTION GUIDE 2: METHODS FOR STUDYING GROUPS GUIDE 3: GROUP STRUCTURE GUIDE 4: ASPECTS OF GROUP STRUCTURE II GUIDE 5: ATTRACTION TO GROUPS GUIDE 6: COHESIVENESS II GUIDE 7: INFLUENCE PROCESSES GUIDE 8: PERFORMANCE & DECISION-MAKING GUIDE 9: LEADERSHIP GUIDE 10: GROUP COOPERATION & CONFLICT

COURSE PAPER PRESENTATION

This site is the first is a series of course guides. They cover what we would normally consider a "class lecture." However, due to class discussion, special topics, or even intriguing tangents, we may only cover a fraction of  the planned topic. Thus my "lecture" is preserved and presented for you on a series of class web sites available 24/7 and we will be able as a class to "forge forward." In any case where I may disagreed with your readings, or may use different terminology, that will also be in these guides.All students are responsible for the information in each course guide.

Check our Blackboard site too. We'll have journal and association links, presentations from prior years, and your presentations.
 

NOTE: Italicized and colored phrases are phrases you should know!

Groups are one of the most "human" things about us. We are social animals*. Indeed, developmental research from the 1940s indicated that orphans who were deprived of most close human social contact had a far higher death rate than those where the infants were systematically picked up and cuddled. Even when we are alone, even in the midst of our most private thoughts, the impact of groups is present:

• In our self-identities and self-descriptions
• In comparing our performances--good or bad--with those of others
• In evaluating our own performances to ourselves
• In literally setting parameters on how we perceive and conceptualize
• In the very language in which we think and speak (although humans appear biologically primed to speak a language)
• In our mood states
• In our numerous "shoulds," "oughts," and "to-do" lists

As group members, we frequently behave in ways we do not as individuals. And our behavior as group members may fluxuate from group to group.

For example:

As a union representative, I find that I am much more assertive than I am in my "other lives."

In his analysis of rape statistics over 20 years ago Wolfgang Kohler discovered that rape is frequently, if not predominantly, a "social crime," i.e., at least two men jointly initiate an assault.

Mary Frank Fox tackled the "myth of the lone scholar." Perhaps you thought that scholars typically scholar read, think, analyze, and write alone; Fox finds science scholarship to be a highly social and team enterprise.

The United States has a strong ideology of individual determinism, so we don't always recognize--or like to admit--how important groups are to us and for us. Most other cultures emphasize the influence of groups on the individual. An individual's achievement may be for her or his family, not a way of garnering individual mobility. Similarly, disgusting or demeaning acts on an individual's part may disgrace his or her family.

Not all collections of individuals are groups. The phenomena of cohorts, aggregates and groups are often treated interchangably. This is a mistake because groups have properties the other two entities do not. Further, confusing, say, a targeted cohort with a crowd with a group only obfuscates the differences among these concepts.

Social Facilitation has become a "catchall" phrase that refers to the effects of having other people** in one's immediate physical environment. The work of Robert Zajonc (pronounced "Zy-ontz"), among others, indicates that the mere presence of other people is physically arousing. Borrowing from several learning theories (especially that of the late Clark Hull), many behavioral scientists assert that moderate amounts of physical anxiety enhance performance. Many studies have found that moderate amounts of anxiety increase the drive or motivational component of the learning/performance equation, thus enhancing the performance of the best-learned response. Too little arousal, and the organism is not motivated, too much and it can be "flooded" by anxiety.

**The lowly cockroach is influenced by the presence of other 'roaches and performs better when an audience of its fellows is underneath the 'roach maze. See below.

Thus, we have studied:

audience effects, where the actor performs and the others are observers. When you present before a class, you experience audience effects.

There are also co-action effects. Co-actors individually perform the same actions at the same time, typically in the same place. Think: group of students in a room writing an exam.

Both types of situations now would be defined as aggregates (see below) and use processes of social facilitation.

In both audience effects and co-action, there is no real division of labor, no coordinated cooperation, in short, neither really resembles what we usually think of as a group. Sometimes co-actors are also in aggregates, however (see below).

The arousal effects of having others present may interfere with learning although they can benefit performance. For example, as a consequence of his series of studies, Zajonc advises students to study alone (rather than in the library or in a study hall) but to take an exam in a group situation, where the arousal effects of co-actors will facilitate the performance of well-learned responses.
 
 

MORE SERIOUSLY

We can apply some of this material to anger management situations such as domestic violence. We know that domestic violence runs in families, and that abused children more often become abusers as adults. This phenomenon is most often interpreted as a case of modeling or imitation learning. However, issues in reward are clearly questionable; most adults who grew up in homes where spousal violence (and often child abuse) occurred rarely approve, and it is unclear exactly what is rewarding about such a situation to anyone, including perpetrators. It is not even clear if such a family of orientation situation contributes to disinhibition in family situations later (although it will influence expectations about family behavior). But we can take our application of social facilitation a step further:

Much family behavior is typically private, taking place "behind closed doors." So one of our widest repertoires of family behavior and our best-learned responses emerges what we each observed in our own families. Because of privacy, we know little about other families' intimate lives. Horribly, another set of learned family behaviors comes from television. Mass media tend to present glossy, idealized, over dramatized, ludicrously unbelievable ("The Beverly Hillbillies"), or disfunctional versions of family life. Considering that some TV families engage in continual mutual insults, that The Three Stooges is still present in reruns, that children treat adults like retarded cretins, and the worst excesses against family members appear to be excusable with "sorry, Babe," the American public is being treated to a terrible series of scripts for familial interaction.

When disagreements and conflicts erupt in families, emotions run high and everyone is in a state of physiological arousal. That is exactly the time when well-learned responses are most often  performed. If those responses are violent, their probability of occurrence is enhanced. Thus, I suspect that social facilitation adds a necessary component for how family violence is transmitted across generations to modeling approaches. While modeling may explain how the behavior is acquired, social facilitation can explain why it is performed when it is.

One solution is to expand work on anger management currently introduced into schools as early as elementary school. Children learn to identify angry feelings and how to express or handle them in more positive ways. I would suggest going a step or two further (and some teachers do), introducing role-playing and rehearsal. Simply reading about alternative behaviors is probably insufficient because reading by itself keeps such behaviors 'way down in the response hierarchy. Role-playing and rehearsal can provide the practice to raise more peacable behaviors in the response repertoire when social facilitation effects make them more likely to be performed.

It doesn't have to be other people. My favorite example of Robert Zajonc's work on social facilitation involves audience effects with our old local friends: cockroaches. I was privileged to observe first-hand trials in his studies with Palmetto Bugs. You will be interested to know that the researchers had great difficulties keeping our Palmetto Bugs alive in chilly Michigan. Zajonc and his students trained cockroaches to "run" toward a light in a clear lucite t-maze. Those of us who have shared a residence with 'roaches can testify that they normally AVOID light. An "audience box" was located beneath the t-maze where the 'roach marathoners could see, and presumably smell, their colleagues. 'Roaches ran their t-mazes faster and more accurately with an audience of their fellow 'roaches than when no audience was present.

Members of a cohort share at least one common characteristic or experience.Demographers usually reserve the term for people who have a common experience at a singular point in time, such as a birth cohort ("generation") or students who entered Florida State University as freshmen in the Fall of 2003. But other examples include the "soccer mom" or "angry white male" vote, i.e., collections of individuals with a common characteristic. Members of a cohort may never meet one another, may never even gather in the same place, and generally do not think of themselves as "group members." In fact, members of a cohort may be quite diverse (are all soccer moms the same?) because other characteristics or experiences cross-cut what they have in common. However, cohort members may self identify with their cohort ("I'm a Generation Xer" or "I'm the soccer mom"). It is likely that our memories of Septemer 11, 2001 will in part set us aside from future generations, just as memories of the Great Depression and Pearl Harbor in part defined many people who are now senior citizens. This self-identification with a cohort can influence behavior through collective identification. Politicians and market researchers are well aware of cohorts, and use them to target segments of the population for advertising and other persuasion campaigns. Cohort experiences may also make it easier for people to get to know each other when they first meet, by providing common experiences.

Aggregates are collections of individuals who are physically proximate at the same time. These could be an aggregate in the Stone Building elevator or a crowd at an FSU football game. Examples are:

Audience effects
Co-action effects
Crowd effects
Fads

Historical studies of riots and revolutions show that crowd behavior can be the spark that topples governments or creates a night of terror. There is at least the suggestion that rape, which is often a group perpetrated event, may be an example of crowd behavior. Studies of these events often reference the arousing effects of others, the apparent normlessness of crowds, and the "confrontational nature" of the events (i.e., spontaneous, unplanned, and immediate).

If the right circumstances are in place, a crowd or a cohort may become a group. If you are with a group of strangers and the Stone elevator begins to play its games, you will probably quickly become a group . Members of a crowd coalesce into revolutionaries. The September 11 attacks joined many New Yorkers, and symbols of American patriotism (flags, bumper stickers, lapel pins) spontaneously and quickly became common.

But it takes more than just a bunch of people together in the same place to be a group. As you can see, aggregates and cohorts do influence behavior. They are phenomena clearly worthy of study--but they typically aren't groups, although they are sometimes confused with groups. We should separate these concepts carefully so that we don't misapply them.
 

  Group or aggregate? We need more information here! (And no clones need apply.)

Almost certainly a group (two groups actually). Why?
 

DEFINING A GROUP

Here are my keys to defining a group. They are parallel although not identical to components that your texts mention. You should notice that Dr. Burn stresses interaction (especially face-to-face interaction) far more than I do:

• (1)members have a self-definition as a group member
• (2) members are identified by others (other-definition) as a group member.It is especially important other group members also identify the individual as belonging to the group.

Without other-definition, we may perceive the person as a fraud and expel them. At the least, we may create  distance mechanisms (such as ignoring the person, "rewriting history" to exclude them from the group, or literally "cutting them out of the picture.) Someone who is "in, but not of" the group is not seen as entitled to group privileges or rewards.

• (3) Interdependent AND common goals that require membership coordination

Interdependent goals require coordination among the membershipto achieve them.
They require the coordinated efforts of at least two people working together.
Interdependent goals imply a division of labor so that each member has a unique and specific task, i.e., a specialized task.

It is the interdependence and interlocking roles that either the group creates (in more informal groups) or that form part of a pre-existing structure (formal groups) that meld people together into a unity.

• (4) A common fate. Both (3) and (4) imply commonality. A very important difference is that collectivities typically and actively choose their goals, doing so consciously as a group. A common fate may be thrust upon individuals who are initially members of cohorts or aggregates rather than groups.

• (5) Cohesiveness

I define cohesiveness as a sense or spirit of group unity collectively held by the membership, i.e., as a group property, rather than some mathematical function of individual scores. I have strong feelings about this issue because I do take the gestault position that "groups are real," i.e., have an existence that is more than some mathematical function of the individuals within it. Burn calls this a more "sociological approach" but I endorsed it long before I spent time as a sociologist. I believe that such a gestault property explains why we must study a family to learn more about individual pathology or understand an institution's structure to explain individual productivity within it (more on this one later.)

• (6) "Normative expectations", i.e., rules regulating member behavior or how members "should behave"

Some behavior that appears idiosyncratic or spontaneous to outsiders may, in fact, be normative for that particular group. Several years ago, when I began an ethnographic study of religious congregations, I was startled the first time someone next to me rose and began speaking in tongues. I soon learned, however, that this individual enacted this behavior during practically every service and at the same part of the service each time, then another congregant would translate for her into English. In another congregation, at one part of the service, an elderly gentleman would rise, toss his cane into the aisle and begin dancing. This happened practically every Sunday, again at the same part of the service. Both behaviors were clearly normative for those congregations and a designated person enacted them in each case at a predictable time point.

• (7) Direct interaction among members. Ironically, this characteristic typically comes to mind first. However, I don't consider a necessary attribute unless the group is quite small. Many groups, particularly secondary or tertiary groups, survive without it. Increasingly with the use of synchronized communication on the Internet groups may never meet each other face-to-face.

People may have face-to-face interaction on a daily basis, yet form an aggregate rather than a group ("the elevator crowd," for example). Online groups often have delayed or "asynchronous" interaction, written and somewhat stilted, depending on server speed, yet may strongly identify with membership. For example, I have been part of the "AAPOR-net" (public opinion research) listserv for over five years and have never directly met many members. Yet after literally thousands of emails, I "feel" that I "know" many persons on it.

How many members does it take to form a group? I have seen some definitions in which only two members (a "dyad") are required (Burn). In other definitions, at least three people must be group members. Keep in mind that, of necessity, dyads cannot experience subgroups, coalitions, or other mechanisms only available to groups of at least three.

One modern innovation is "groups" that only communicate via the Internet. These may be members of various chat rooms, listservs associated with professional societies, or students who are all enrolled in a Distance Learning course. Communication is sometimes delayed and sometimes practically instantaneous. The development of high speed networks with accompanying software is making synchronized communication much more common.

Experimentally, such "groups" are actually an old story. One common experimental paradigm to assess the group effects is to create a bogus group accessed only through computer. Thus, the experimenters can precisely arrange feedback and other information from "group members" to the naive participant. Many studies show that "membership" in and feedback from these contrived computer groups affect behavior, attitudes, and identity. Thus, we should expect online groups to also influence their members, probably even more so, because interaction is more naturalistic and group members typically have elements in common.

But are online groups really groups in the sense of the defining characteristics listed above?

REVIEW THESE DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS HERE!

For obvious reasons, research on online issues is just beginning. However, here are some factors to mention:

• Many chat room members have strong emotional ties to these chat rooms. This occurs both in Distance Learning courses and regular Internet "rooms." For example, I now work professionally with one scholar I have met only twice--the first time, a year and a half after we began an online correspondence. Prior to our first meeting, we spoke twice on the telephone to arrange the meeting. In a second case, I have become professionally involved with someone I finally met TWO years after our first online interaction because I invited him to be a panel member at a conference based on our online interaction.

• People marry others whom they have met online. In my old hometown, the Detroit area, one poor soul travelled from France to the USA in 2000, only to commit suicide because her online lover decided not to marry her. Members of listservs conduct lengthy and hot discussions on all kinds of topics. Online focus groups are now a reality. All these examples argue that groups can and do form online.

 
• eBay (my passion the past three years) brings together buyers and sellers, and sometimes buyers with buyers, in MILLIONS of online auctions each day. Frequently, eBay members decide whether to bid or accept bids based on a "village-like" system out in cyber-space, in which members who have completed transactions post "feedback" about other members. Positive feedback not only references prompt and well-packed shipments, or speedy payment, but often the quality of the individual's online persona, the "friendliness" of their email, and their attributed personal qualities.

• The lack of physical proximity lends a more stilted formal quality to many online interactions that is atypical of groups meeting face-to-face.

• People can, and, often do, misrepresent themselves online and there may be no way to establish the veracity of their assertions. This has led to tragedies such as individuals murdered by a "chatroom buddy." When I was a grand juror for over a year, we reviewed many cases where pedophiles misrepresenting themselves attempted to lure young children (typically young boys) into meetings. By the same token, the adult (often female) federal agents who arrested these pedophiles represented themselves online as boys in early puberty in order to set up bogus meetings in real time. These misrepresentations would have been highly unlikely in other settings.

• There is the "pull of the familiar" that can interfere with online group identification. While one might not consider leaving a face to face on-going meeting in real time to have a meal or take a telephone call (the latter evoking negative group sanctions in most cases), one merely needs to leave the computer to do laundry or chat with a spouse to "break the group spell."

However, more recent studies suggest that interaction via the Internet may, in fact, be eroding face to face ties with close friends and relatives. A journal that investigates this (particularly in its early issues) is IT (information technology) & Society. You may want to investigate this more recent research here:

IT & Society

The work of John Robinson and his colleagues on time use and Internet use is also relevant, for example:

"Mass Media Use and Social Life among Internet Users"
 

  Dare I say: stay tuned?

OVERVIEW

READINGS

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Susan Carol Losh January 9 2005