Group influence is more important in determining behaviour than personal characters. Discuss.

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Group influence is more important in determining behaviour

than personal characters.  Discuss.

There is wide agreement among social psychologists that people behave differently in interpersonal settings than in collective or group settings.  Indeed there is ample empirical evidence, some of which will be examined in detail below, for what appears to be a “discontinuity” between the behaviour of people acting as individuals and the behaviour of people acting as group members.

A key element of the approach to this question is the distinction between the individual self (or personal identity) and the collective self (or social identity).  It is hard to provide a comprehensive definition of a group.  Group dynamics expert Marvin Shaw (1981) argues that all groups have one thing in common: their members interact.  He therefore defines a group as two or more people who interact and influence one another.  John Turner (1987) notes that groups perceive themselves as “us” in contrast to “them”.  In the following analysis I am going to consider the extent to which collective influence affects peoples behaviour in contrast to an individuals normal behaviour outside an interacting group.  The three main areas to consider are: social facilitation, de-individualisation and conformity.

One way of determining whether group influence has a greater influence over behaviour than a personal acting solely on the basis of their personal characteristics is to examine the performance of an individual under the two different circumstances.  

Social Facilitation and Inhibition

Social facilitation refers to the situation whereby the performance of an individual is improved in the presence of others; this could be co-action – task performance in a group, or passive – task performance in front of an audience.  Experiments in this area have produced mixed results.  Sometimes co-action seemed to facilitate performance (e.g. Triplett 1898), particularly the quantitative aspects of performance, while in other studies the quality of performance was impaired in co-action settings (e.g. Gates and Allee, 1933).

An explanation for these ambiguous results was put forward by Zajonc (1965).  His theory proposes that audiences or other group members enhance the emission of dominant responses.  A dominant response is defined as “the response which prevails, that is, takes precedence in a subject’s response repertoire in a given stimulus situation.”  (Hewstone et al, Introduction to Social Psychology 2nd e, p443).  On simple tasks, where the dominant response is the correct one, it was found that doing a task in front of an audience enhanced people’s performance in comparison to when in isolation.  In contrast, on complicated tasks for which the correct answer is not dominant, the presence of an audience only served to increase the proportion of incorrect answers given, compared to when the task was performed in isolation.

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An experiment that supports this solution was conducted by James Michaels (1982).  He observed the number of balls potted by good and weak pool players under the conditions of an audience and playing alone.  The results were as follows:


A graph showing the percentage of balls potted under different conditions

(Source: Myers. D, Social Psychology, p317).

It can be seen from the graph that for good players, the dominant response is to make a good shot.  The dominant response increases with the presence of an audience by 11%.  The weak player however, whose ...

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