Social Influence and Group Processes

Groups form through proximity (repeated interaction with people nearby), similarity (people like others who share their attitudes and values, which gives consistency and validation) and common motives and goals. Bruce Tuckman suggested that groups pass through five stages of development. In forming, members first meet and there is great uncertainty about the group, its goal and how it will be achieved. In storming, there is intragroup conflict — about how the goal is to be achieved, who controls the group and its resources, and who does which task. In norming, members develop norms of behaviour and a positive group identity. In performing, the group's structure has evolved and been accepted, and it moves towards achieving its goal; for some groups this is the last stage. In adjourning, the group disbands once its purpose is met. Groups do not always move through the stages in a strict sequence; they may go back and forth between them.

Groups are of several types. Primary groups are pre-existing, given to the individual — family, caste, religion — with face-to-face interaction, close physical proximity and warm emotional bonds; they are central to socialisation. Secondary groups are those the individual chooses to join, such as a political party; relationships in them are more impersonal, indirect and less frequent, and it is easier to leave them. Formal groups have explicitly stated functions and rules, as in an office organisation, with definite roles; informal groups form without formal rules and have close relationships among members. An ingroup is one's own group ("we"); an outgroup is another group ("they").

Social facilitation is the tendency to perform better in the presence of others. Norman Triplett observed in 1898 that cyclists rode faster when racing against others than when riding alone. Robert Zajonc explained that the presence of others produces arousal, which improves performance on simple or well-learned tasks but impairs it on complex or new ones; performance is also affected by the feeling of being evaluated, and by whether the others present are co-actors doing the same task. Social loafing is the reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task, one in which outputs are pooled — as when a team pulls a rope, in studies associated with Bibb Latané. It happens because members feel less responsible for the outcome, their individual effort will not be evaluated, their performance is not compared with others', coordination is poor, and belonging to the group may not matter to them. It can be reduced by making each person's effort identifiable, increasing commitment to the task, increasing the task's apparent importance, making people feel their contribution matters, and strengthening group cohesiveness.

Group polarisation is the tendency of groups to take more extreme decisions than individuals would take alone: a group whose members lean towards a view comes out of discussion holding it more strongly. It happens because members are exposed to new arguments in favour of the view, because of a bandwagon effect — the view seems popular, so more people join it — and because identifying with the ingroup pushes members towards its position. A related danger in highly cohesive groups is groupthink, described by Irving Janis: the desire for unanimity overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives, so that dissent is suppressed and poor decisions are made.

Muzafer Sherif studied norm formation using the autokinetic effect: a stationary point of light in a completely dark room appears to move. Asked to judge how far it moved, individuals gave widely different estimates when alone, but in a group their estimates converged on a common figure — a group norm — which they kept even when tested alone later. Solomon Asch studied conformity with a task that had a clear right answer: participants judged which of three comparison lines matched a standard line, while confederates in the group unanimously gave wrong answers on some trials. A large number of participants conformed to the obviously wrong majority at least some of the time. The book lists the determinants of conformity: the size of the group (conformity is greater in a small group, where a deviant is easily noticed); the size of the minority (as it grows, conformity falls); public rather than private expression of behaviour; and personality, some people having a conforming personality and others being more independent. People conform because norms make social behaviour predictable (normative influence, the wish to be accepted) and because others' behaviour is taken as information about what is correct (informational influence).

• Foot-in-the-door technique: begin with a small request that is likely to be accepted, then follow it with a larger one.
• Deadline technique: announce that an offer is available only for a limited time, so people comply before it "runs out".
• Door-in-the-face technique: begin with a large request that is likely to be refused, then follow it with a smaller one, which now seems reasonable.

Stanley Milgram studied obedience in experiments in which a participant, as the "teacher", was told to give electric shocks of increasing strength to a "learner" — actually a confederate who received no shocks — each time he made a mistake. When participants hesitated, the experimenter insisted that they continue; about two-thirds went on to the maximum shock level. The book gives the reasons people obey even when it hurts others: they feel they are not responsible for their actions, merely carrying out orders; authority carries symbols of status, such as a uniform or a title, that are hard to resist; authority escalates its commands gradually, from small to larger; and events move so fast that there is no time to think.

Groups may work together towards shared goals — cooperation — or struggle against one another — competition. Under cooperative goals each member can attain the goal only if all the others attain it too; under competitive goals each can attain it only if the others do not. Morton Deutsch found that cooperative groups showed more coordination, attentiveness to one another, communication and productivity than competitive groups. Whether people cooperate depends on the reward structure, interpersonal communication and reciprocity. Belonging to groups also gives people a social identity — the part of the self-concept based on group membership — which provides belonging and self-esteem but, when ingroup identity is strong, can feed bias against outgroups.

Intergroup conflict arises from a lack of communication and faulty perceptions, relative deprivation (the feeling that one's group has less than it deserves compared with another), the belief that one's group is not respected or is being exploited, strong ingroup identity, and the perception that the other group's intentions are hostile. Muzafer Sherif's summer-camp study with boys aged 11–12 showed it happening in three stages: first the boys were divided into two groups and each built its own identity; then a series of competitive games produced open hostility between them; and finally the hostility was reduced not by contact alone but by superordinate goals — problems, such as a breakdown in the camp's water supply, that neither group could solve without the other. The book lists strategies for resolving conflict: introducing superordinate goals; altering perceptions through persuasion, education and the media; increasing intergroup contact under the right conditions; redrawing group boundaries so that groups see themselves as part of a larger whole; negotiation; structural solutions that redistribute resources by principles of justice — equality, need and equity; and respecting the other group's territory.