Advanced Social Psychology

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Advanced Social Psychology

• Conceptualizing the social group

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Overview

• The rehabilitation of the group Groups and norms
  
• Sherif and Asch
• Decline of the group
• Reconceptualization of interdependence
• Evidence against the individualistic approach
• SCT and the social identity perspective

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Groups and norms

• Behaviourist hegemony
• Rehabilitation of the group theorists influenced
  by the Gestalt tradition, e.g. Kurt Lewin
• Stress on the meanings of social situations
• Psychological changes in group settings

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• interaction between people within groups created
  norms and values not reducible to individuals
• Laboratory experiments

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Sherif (1936)

• Autokinetic effect study
• group norms as emergent products of interaction
  within a group
• The group comprised the supra-individual frame of
  reference, and served to define social reality

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• Gestalt the whole is more then the sum of its
  parts
• We perceive structure/relationship. Not just
  elements
• Element takes meaning from place in whole
• Individual behaviour explicable in terms of group
  membership

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• Process Internalization of norms
• Phenomenological reality of group for members

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Asch (1952)

• a table can be understood as such (functionally)
  rather than simply as a mass of atoms
• Allport (you cant trip over a group)
• a fallacious distinction between concrete things
  (such as real individuals) and abstract relations
  (such as groups or systems of things)
• relations between things are just as real as
  things

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• Both group mind and stimulus-response ignore
  the reality of part-whole relations and instead
  posit a substance
• Asch a psychology of representations (of self,
  group, world)
• Group behaviour takes place to the extent that
  individuals (part) have shared representations of
  the group (whole)

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Decline of the group three reasons (Steiner,
1974)

• Practical issues
• Social context
• The rise of cognitive approaches

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Cognition

• Many social psychologists came from cognitive
  psychology
• social psychology became a psychology of social
  perceptions
• One expression of a wider return to individualism

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Reconceptualizing interdependence

• Sherif, Asch and Lewin group members in a group
  form a functional unity or dynamic system
• Norms and other group products are emergent
  dependent upon their membership of the group
• Hence interdependence between group members as a
  group and their group-product

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• Later
• interdependence conceptualized in terms of the
  satisfaction of each individuals needs.
• Hence a group is understood as the sum total of
  needs interdependence for knowledge, for
  rewards etc. - between individuals
• Hence group is based on interpersonal
  interdependence

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• Implications of reconceptualization
• Focus on relations between individuals and given
  needs
• Individuals not changed qualitatively by group
  membership
• Hence group itself not a determinant not a
  psychological reality
• No difference between acting as group members vs
  acting as individuals

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Some evidence against the individualistic approach

• MGP
• Nominal/random allocation to groups
• no social interaction or contact
• no link between group membership and members
  interests
• Ps didnt know who was in which group
• No basis for interpersonal attraction

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• Result
• participants acted as group members they gave
  less in absolute amounts to ingroup members in
  order to give them relatively more than outgroup
  members
• Implications
• interpersonal attraction unnecessary for group
  formation
• Instead, perceptual categorization is the basic
  process underlying group formation

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• Reversal of causal sequence
• positive interdependence can be understood as
  possible criteria of social categorization
• the group is a pre-condition for attraction,
  influence and co-operation

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Self-categorization theory and the Social
Identity perspective

• SIT a theory of intergroup behaviour and
  intergroup discrimination
• SCT how people are able to act as a group at all

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SCT

• cognitive representations of the self take the
  form, among other things, of self-categorizations
  
• personal self-categorizations do not have a
  privileged status in defining the self than
  shared self-categorizations (social categories)
• group behaviour is possible because/where people
  share a common self-categorization

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SCT

• Depersonalization people shift from a personal
  to a shared self-categorization
• psychological group formation take places to the
  extent that two or more people come to perceive
  and define themselves in terms of some shared
  ingroup-outgroup categorization.

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Comparison with previous approaches

• Individual cognition
• SCT suggests how the group operates
  psychologically through being represented in the
  individual mind.
•  
• SCT posits many group identities as social givens
•  
• A categorization becomes salient when there is
  both comparative fit and normative fit
  definitions of social categories are social,
  historical and cultural phenomena.

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Comparison with previous approaches

• Interdependence
• Originally interdependence had a Gestalt quality
  Members were qualitatively changed by membership.
•  
• SCT is an interdependence theory in this sense
  it holds that groups are organized wholes which
  are more than the sum of their parts.

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Comparison with previous approaches

• Research practice
• If the group sum total of the interpersonal
  relationships between its members then study
  group processes by looking at face-to-face
  interaction.
•  
• But if groups are to be understood in terms of
  categorizations, then physical co-presence is not
  necessary.
•  
• A typical social identity or self-categorization
  study involves a pen and paper test, in which
  group members are described rather than actually
  encountered.

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Conclusions

• What is the psychological status of the group?
• SCT answer Psychologically real
• Discontinuity b/w individual and group shift
  from personal to shared self-categorizations
• Shared self-categorizations guide behaviour

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• Making sense of empirical phenomena
• Acting on the basis of national categories
  irrespective of individuals in the group
• Not mere presence or mere submergence in a
  crowd leading to group processes
• Psychological crowd vs aggregate phenomenal
  differences

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• Three key points

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Summary

• Lewin, Sherif and Asch the group (whole) is more
  than the sum of its parts (individuals)
• group norms as emergent products internalized by
  group members
• Decline of the group practical reasons, social
  context, rise of cognitive approaches

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• Interdependence became reconceptualized from a
  relationship between group and members to one
  between individuals
• ? group as epiphenomenon
• MGP showed that interpersonal interdependence
  unnecessary for group behaviour

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• Social identity approach/SCT people act as group
  members because they self-categorize themselves
  with others
• Hence the group is psychologically real can be
  used to explain behaviour.