PSYCH253 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7-12: Social Loafing, Deindividuation, Intensify
Document Summary
The presence of others is arousing and helps our performance on easy tasks but hurts our performance on difficult tasks. Being in a crowd, or in crowded conditions, is similarly arousing and has the same type of effects on performance. The reason we are aroused by others" presence is because we worry about how we are evaluated by others. The presence of others is also distracting, and that accounts for some of the effects as well. When people"s efforts are pooled and individual effort is not evaluated, people generally exert less effort in groups than individually. Deindividuation occurs when people are in a large group, are physically anonymous, and are aroused and distracted. When researchers originally studied the ways that groups make decisions differently from individuals, they found that groups make riskier decisions; but as they examined more types of decisions, they found that groups make more polarized decisions.
