Chapter . Critical Learning Exercises - Group Processes

Students may discuss how some groups feel more cohesive or have more entitativity, which may result in greater adherence to group norms of behaviors or characteristics, how adapting to belong to a group helps promote survival or achieving goals, or how adhering to group norms and roles helps reduce uncertainty, which reduces how much members have to think about how to act. All of these may lead to switching identities to fit into the group. Whether or not this reduces our authenticity is debatable and subject to whether the student believes how they act when wearing different masks is agreeable or aligns with their normal behavior, or if they act differently than normal because their actions in the group are disagreeable to them or are outside their norm.

Students’ suggestions for helping a person with performance anxiety in a group context will differ but should clearly break down the problem in terms of the person, the task, and the audience. Possible answers may discuss social facilitation theory (e.g., increasing confidence and ability in public speaking may result in improved performance), arousal (e.g., if the person practices and feels confident in their public speaking abilities, then their arousal will create a challenge response instead of their current threatened response), or evaluation (e.g., encourage the person to disengage from self-evaluation and concern with the audience’s evaluation of his speech).

Students’ recommendations for the steps the leader of a start-up can use to prevent groupthink (a group’s failure to analyze a problem completely in lieu of preserving group harmony) will vary but are likely to focus on the following: increasing group diversity, allowing dissent, reinterpreting group cohesion, encouraging individuality, and planning to be objective.

Explanations for when and why people might stick with a political party that seems to act against personal interests will differ but should be based on the principles of system justification and group identification. In applying system justification, students may focus on how we go along with the stereotypes of the group since they support a societal hierarchy that is fair and good, and people get what they deserve, even if this means we might fall into one of those stereotyped groups. In addition, those who are higher in social justification are less likely to challenge the collective action of their group. In applying social identity perspective, students may focus on how some individuals fuse their identity so that “me” and “we” become merged together, which makes them more likely to sacrifice their own well-being for the good of the group.