Welcome to lesson twelve, module two, interaction in
groups.
Let’s move on to slide two and begin. One of the problems that groups
face is coordination loss. That is in working in a group, we try not to
step on anyone’s toes. We try not to hurt anyone’s feelings and
typically maintain a positive interaction. There are some cures to help
coordination loss, one of these is called corporate culture. The extent
to which your corporate culture is developed, it encourages group norms
that help cooperation, there will be less coordination loss. In addition
the more cohesive the group is, the better they are able to cooperate
with one another. However cohesiveness also influences social influence,
that is the ability of one group member to influence the opinion,
behavior or attitude of another group member. The more cohesive the
group is, the more likely it is that members will have mutual social
influence. Also cohesive groups tend to attract and keep valuable
members. A group may have coordination loss by losing experts in the
group because they don’t want to be in a group that isn’t cohesive or
that has problems cooperating.
Let’s move on to slide three. In a group, especially decision making
group such as juries or people coming together in terms of a committee
to
come to a decision, shared versus unshared information becomes
important. Many times we construct groups so that we have experts
in a wide variety of fields. We believe that they have unshared
information. That is they all bring their own level of expertise or
topic of expertise to the table and will then inform others so that the
decision will be the best one possible. However, what we know from
empirical evidence is that when groups get together, usually they spend
most of the time talking about shared information, what everybody
already knows, and very little time and only later talking about
unshared information. When there is a group member who is cognitive or informationally central, we call this person a cognitively central
member. What this means is this person has the most shared information
with other members of the group. For example, I know more about each of
you in the on-line class than perhaps you all know about one another,
especially since interaction is minimized. Therefore, in this class I
would be cognitively or informationally central.
Let’s move on to slide four. Another interesting phenomenon is that of
transactive memory. The idea here is that when groups remember
information, they often rely on each group member to be responsible for
remembering things that they are expert in. Often transactive memories
are based on stereotypes. We expect women in the group to remember
traditionally feminine topics and men in the group to remember
traditionally masculine topics. What works with the group and makes the
group work well together can become a rut if the group fails to ask,
for example, a female member who has a master’s degree in statistical
analysis to put forth her opinion about statistical issues. Let me give
you an example of an empirical study that shows how fundamental this transactive memory
whose use of stereotypes in transactive memory is.
Let’s move on to slide five. Dyads, two people that is, came together and
were exposed to one of these two lists. Motor oil should be changed
every three months, nylon is used to make fishing net, cats should not
be allowed on the kitchen table, the pen is near the jewelry box. Their
task is to remember, as a dyad, the underlying word. They’re not allowed
to talk or discuss. So you might think they would take an approach where
each person would get every other word, so I’ll remember oil, you
remember net, I’ll remember table, you remember box. However, this is
not what we found. The differences between list one and list two are important. The
underlying word remains the same, however, the context is different. The
context is masculine for motor oil and fishing net and feminine for
vegetable oil and hair net.
Let’s move on to slide six. So participants are randomly put into dyads.
Dyads are asked to remember the underlying words shown to them in each
of the sentences. Remember there’s only one word per sentence. This has
been a hard task and there’s no reason it should be gendered in any way.
They were seated in front of a single monitor and shown one of those two
lists. After they had seen the list, they were then later asked to
recall the words on the list as a dyad.
Let’s move to slide seven and examine what was found. Here we’re looking
at individual scores, that is, what each person recalls in dyad and
their masculine recall. On the y axis, you see equal results, a zero
means that the list is split 50/50, with each partner recalling 50% of
the masculine words. What you find is that when males were with male
partners, they recalled more than their share, that is, above 50% of the
masculine words. But even more so when they had female partners.
Interestingly, females also recalled more masculine words than was their
fair share when they had female partners. You see the two way
interaction is quite high with the p less than .02. In addition you can
also see that there’s clearly a main effect of participant sex, such
that males
recalled more masculine words than females. This was expected and not as
interesting as the interaction. The interaction implies that females
presume that their female partners probably won’t be responsible for the
masculine words, and socially compensate by recalling those words
themselves.
Let’s look at feminine recall on slide eight. Here again zero means that
they’ve divided the words equally. When males had female partners, they
recalled even fewer than 50% of the feminine words. When males had male
partners, they recalled more than their fare share of the feminine
words, assuming again that their male partners would not recall those
words but try to take up the slack they socially compensated by
recalling even more of the words than they thought they should have,
given that their partner was female. Again females feared if they had a
female partner, recalled close to half, that's very near zero in terms of
quality. However, when females are paired with a male partner, they
again compensated for the fact that their partner was male and recalled
more than their half.
Let’s move on to slide nine and discuss something else. So what do you
do. If people are gonna use their stereotype to hold you responsible for
information, what can you do if you don’t fit the stereotype. For
example if you’re a woman who knows a great deal about a masculine topic
or vice versa. One you can state your expertise. Don’t be modest. Tell
people what you’re good at. If you’re an expert in statistics, tell them
regardless of what gender you are. This is often more difficult for
women because women are expected to be modest and if they boast or state
their expertise, it’s often perceived as boastful and are more likely to
be excluded from their group or disliked. But it may be important for
the group to work well together that everyone know what everyone is good
at. If you’re the leader of a group, you can speak out expertise, by asking
everyone to do everything, instead of assuming that Jane, who knows a
lot about cooking, she always do the cooking. You might ask Bob if he
has any interest in doing some of the cooking for the group. This can be
helpful and Bob may really want to learn more about doing that, but
hasn’t had the opportunity, or in fact he may have some background as a
chef, but you wouldn’t know if you rely on your stereotype.
Let’s move on to slide ten. In a classroom study, students were exposed
to words commonly found on the GRE. They were put into groups and
periodically during the lecture they were asked to come up with
definitions for the words that appeared. There were groups numbered one
through ten, even groups and odd groups. Later in a subsequent class,
they were put into groups comprised of new members. That is people they
weren’t in groups with originally, however, the groups were composed of
members who were even or odd. What we found is that even groups recalled
more even words than odd words, and odd groups recalled more odd words
than even words. This makes perfect sense and demonstrates the idea that
even when you put a group of people together, having a diversity of
expertise, for example, a mixed group might have done better in a recall
task overall.
Let’s move on to slide eleven. So when you’re in a group and you’re
trying to maintain harmony, how might you compromise? One thing to be
aware of is depolarization versus polarization. Traditionally we talk
about the risky shift study. That is, if you have a group who is
slightly in favor of a policy and you happen to have a group discussion
about it, at the end everyone will be very much in favor of the policy.
This is called group polarization. It works not only in the groups who
are more risky, but depending on what the original thought of each
individual member is, it becomes more extreme in both cases. So the lean
becomes the shift, not always risky but certainly more extreme than the
original lean would imply. You should also think about how heuristic or
peripheral processing is related to polarization. Clearly polarization
occurs perhaps because of consensus and mastery and consensus and
connectedness, that is the group may have influence. If you’re not
thinking about something very thoroughly because you want to understand
the environment and if everyone else seems to agree with the policy,
then you’re going to go along with it, assuming that they’re right. This
meets your need for mastery. However, if there’s a consensus some of
those people tend to agree with the policy, you may choose to go along
simply for belongingness and for connectedness to feel one with the group.
However, if it’s something that you’re motivated to systematically or
centrally process, how would polarization work? Well if you are thinking
about and paying a great deal of attention to the decision making
process, what you’ll find is that majority arguments typically get most
of the play time, that is, there are more of them, more people
presenting them, they tend to be more compelling and be given better
presentation, therefore even if you were trying to systematically
process and not just go along with the crowd, you would still likely try
polarization because the majority arguments are going to be more
prevalent in that setting.
That concludes lesson twelve, module two. Thank you.
