Humanities Homework Help

• The Role of Normative Social Influence Normative pressures make it difficult for people to stop obeying authority figures. They want to please the authority figure by doing a good job.
• The Role of Informational Social Influence The obedience studies created a confusing situation for participants, with competing, ambiguous demands. Unclear about how to define what was going on, they followed the orders of the expert.
• Other Reasons Why We Obey Participants conformed to the wrong norm: They continued to follow the norms of “obey authority” and “all in the name of science” even when it was no longer appropriate to do so. It was difficult for them to abandon these initial norms because of the fast-paced nature of the study, the fact that the shock levels increased in small increments, and their loss of a feeling of personal responsibility.
• The Obedience Studies, Then and Now Milgram’s research design was criticized on ethical grounds, involving deception, informed consent, psychological distress, the right to withdraw, and inflicted insight. A recent U.S. replication found that the level of obedience in the early 21st century was not significantly different from that found in the classic study in the 1960s.

CHAPTER 9 SUMMARY FROM BOOK

• What Is a Group? A group consists of two or more (usually more) people who interact with each other and are interdependent.
  • Why Do People Join Groups? The need to belong to groups may be innate. Groups also allow us to accomplish difficult objectives, serve as a source of information about the social world, and are an important part of our social identities. People are sensitive to rejection from groups and do what they can to avoid it. Groups also make people feel distinctive from members of other groups.
  • The Composition and Functions of Groups Groups tend to consist of homogeneous members, in part because groups have social norms that people are expected to obey. Groups also have well-defined social roles, shared expectations about how people are supposed to behave. People can get so far into a social role that their personal identities and personalities get lost. Group cohesiveness, qualities of a group that bind members together and promote liking between members, is another important property of groups that influences the group’s performance. So does a group’s composition, with diversity sometimes negatively associated with group morale but positively associated with a range of performance outcomes.

• Individual Behavior in a Group Setting Research has compared the performance of people who are by themselves versus in groups.
  • Social Facilitation: When the Presence of Others Energizes Us When people’s individual efforts on a task can be evaluated, the mere presence of others leads to social facilitation: Their performance is enhanced on simple tasks but impaired on complex tasks.
  • Social Loafing: When the Presence of Others Relaxes Us When people’s individual efforts cannot be evaluated, the mere presence of others leads to relaxation and social loafing: Performance is impaired on simple or unimportant tasks but enhanced on complex tasks.
  • Gender and Cultural Differences in Social Loafing: Who Slacks Off the Most? Social loafing is more prevalent among men than women and more prevalent in Western than Asian cultures.
  • Deindividuation: Getting Lost in the Crowd The mere presence of others can also lead to more serious consequences such as deindividuation, the loosening of normal constraints on behavior when people are in crowds.

• Group Decisions: Are Two (or More) Heads Better Than One? Research has compared how people make decisions when they are by themselves versus in groups.
  • Process Loss: When Group Interactions Inhibit Good Problem Solving Groups make better decisions than individuals if they are good at pooling independent ideas and listening to the expert members of the group. Often, however, process loss occurs, which is any aspect of group interaction that inhibits good decision making. For example, groups often focus on the information they have in common and fail to share unique information. Tightly knit, cohesive groups are also prone to groupthink, which occurs when maintaining group cohesiveness and solidarity becomes more important than considering the facts in a realistic manner.
  • Group Polarization: Going to Extremes Group polarization causes individuals to become more extreme in their attitudes than they were before group discussions; in this manner, group decisions can be more risky or more cautious than individual decisions, depending on which direction the individual members were initially leaning.
  • Leadership in Groups There is little support for the great person theory, which argues that good leadership is a matter of having the right personality traits. Leaders adopt specific kinds of leadership styles, such as transactional or transformational. Leadership effectiveness is a function of both the kind of person a leader is and the nature of the work situation. Although strides have been made, women are still underrepresented in leadership positions. Women who become leaders often face a “glass cliff” whereby they are put in charge of work units that are in crisis and in which the risk of failure is high. Further, there is a double bind for women leaders: If they conform to societal expectations about how they ought to behave, by being warm and communal, they are often perceived as having low leadership potential. If they succeed in attaining a leadership position and act in ways that leaders are expected to act—namely, in agentic, forceful ways—they are often perceived negatively for not “acting like a woman should.”

• Conflict and Cooperation Research has examined how people resolve conflicts when they have incompatible goals.
  • Social Dilemmas These occur when the most beneficial action for an individual will, if chosen by most people, have harmful effects for everyone. A commonly studied social dilemma is the prisoner’s dilemma, in which two people must decide whether to look out for only their own interests or for their partner’s interests as well. Creating trust is crucial in solving this kind of conflict, and a variety of situational factors can render individual cooperation more likely.
  • Using Threats to Resolve Conflict Research has found that using threats tends to escalate rather than resolve conflicts, even more so when both sides have equal threat capacity.
  • Negotiation and Bargaining When two sides are negotiating and bargaining, it is important to look for an integrative solution whereby each side concedes the most on issues that are unimportant to it but are important to its adversary.