PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Group Decision-Making, Social Facilitation, Group Polarization
Chapter 12: Groups
The Nature and Purpose of Group Living
• Human beings, like all large primates except the orangutan, are group-living animals
who influence, and must get along with, others
Social Facilitation
• Social facilitation refers to the positive or negative effect on performance due to the
presence of others
o Dominant response is i a perso’s hierarhy of possile resposes i ay
context, the response he or she is most likely to make
o Arousal from the presence of others inreases people’s tedey to do hat
comes naturally
o On easy tasks, they are predisposed to respond correctly, so increasing this
tedey failitates perforae; o e or hard tasks he they’re ot
predisposed to respond correctly, arousal hinders performance by making them
more likely to respond incorrectly
• The mere presence of others leads to social facilitation effects, and other factors,
including evaluation apprehension, can intensify them
o Defied as people’s oer aout ho they ight appear to others, or be
evaluated by them
o According to distraction-conflict theory, awareness of another person can
create a conflict between focusing on that person and the task at hand, a conflict
that is itself arousing
• Social loafing is the tendency to exert less effort on a group task when individual
contributions cannot be monitored
Group Decision Making
• Groupthink refers to the faulty thinking by members of cohesive groups, in which
critical decision-making scrutiny is subverted by social pressures to reach consensus
o Groupthink has been implicated in the faulty decision making that has led to
various policy fiascos
• Group decision making is affected by how cohesive a group is, how directive its leader is,
and by ingroup pressures that can lead to the rejection of alternative viewpoints and to
self-censorship, the tendency to refrain from expressing reservations in the face of
apparent group consensus
• Risky shift is the tendency for groups to make riskier decisions than individuals would
• Group discussion can create group polarization; initial leanings in a risky direction tend
to be made riskier by group discussion, and initial leanings in a conservative direction
tend to be made more conservative
o Defined as the tendency for group decisions to be more extreme than those
made by individuals; whatever way the group as a whole is leaning, group
discussion tends to make it lean further in that direction
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