Groups & Individuals

GROUP

Definition

Two or more people who, for longer than a few moments, interact with and influence one another and perceived one another as “us”. This definition by group dynamics expert Marvin Shaw (1981) argued that all groups have one thing in common which is their members interact. For example, at a soccer game, a few of people recognize themselves as ‘us’ fans compared with ‘them’ the opposing fans. This is considered a group since both sets of people were influenced and interacting with each other and perceives themselves as ‘us’. Other example might be a group of peoples jogging together every morning.

However, a few students working individually in a computer room is not a group because they only a collection of unrelated individuals in a common place rather than an interacting group. They didn’t influence each other. Other examples of a few peoples which are not regarded as a group include people standing in line at Legoland, people on the elevator, or the students that are waiting together outside the principal’s office.

Being define as influencing each other, there are a few phenomenons in a group which are related to the group and individual influences. They are social facilitation, social loafing and deindividuation. Each phenomenon indicates the important of group in influencing the individual behavior and attitude.

SOCIAL FACILITATION

Definition

        There are two definition of social facilitation. First, the original meaning. It is the tendency of people to perform simple or well-learned tasks better when others are present. This phenomena was firstly founded by Norman Triplett (1898) when he noticed that a cyclist cycles his bicycle faster when he race with other cyclists compared to when he race against the clock which means he race to clock the fastest time. Then, he administer an experiment in the lab where he found that children wound the string on fishing reel faster in the presence of another contestant than if alone.

        To prove this phenomenon further, we have collected the data from F1 racing to see if this phenomenon is still relevant in present days. From the data we conclude that all the drivers clock the time faster in each lap during a race day compared to a times clocked during the qualifying session. The difference is during a race day, they race against each other while during qualifying they race against time to clock the best time.

Table 1 : Fastest lap clocked during the qualifying session.

[pic 1]

        [pic 2]

[pic 3]

[pic 4]

Table 2 : Fastest lap clocked during the race day.[pic 5]

[pic 6]

[pic 7]

[pic 8]

Second meaning of social facilitation from Robert Zajonc (1965) which is currently used is the strengthening of dominant (prevalent, likely) responses in the presence of others. According to Zajonc, arousal enhances whatever response tendency is dominant. Figure 3 below shows how Zajonc describes the effects of social arousal in the presence of others.

Figure 1 :

[pic 9]

        In summary, the presence of other people could enhance the easy and well learned behavior while at the same time impairing the difficult and complex behavior. It should boost performance on easy task and hurt performance on difficult task. This explain why subject in Triplett’s experiment winding the fishing reels better because it is the well learned task.

In the other words, when others observe us, we feel aroused. If the task is simple or well learned, this arousal is to our advantage. If the task is difficult, this arousal is detrimental. For example, good pool players improve when people are watching while bad pool players get even worse when someone is watching.

        In the crowded situation where the presence of many others is concerned, the arousal tends to be higher. It cause the people to perspire more, breathe faster, tense their muscle more, and have higher blood pressure and a faster heart rate. This intensifies the effect of social arousal. The well learned task improved further in the presence of crowd but the new and difficult task will be badly deteriorated. For instance, most soccer teams played well and win in the presence of their supporters at home stadium, but lose at the opponent’s stadium when their supporters are not there.