 This is lecture nine. In this lecture, we'll be talking about group processes. And of course, we talked about groups before. We actually talked about groups a lot already. But we primarily focused up to this point on the human tendency to conform to others in our surroundings. So if a group acts in a certain way, we have this tendency to conform to that group. But groups impact us on so many other levels. And today we're going to see many examples of the various ways in which groups impact the individual. And also how groups by itself behave. So in the first part of this lecture, we're going to be talking about group performance. So what is the effect of being in a group on our performance? So let's start by looking at the definition of groups. It's very straightforward, but of course it's psychology, we want to have definitions as well. So when are you in a group? Are you in a group, for example, if you're entering an elevator and everybody is in that elevator and you're just, do you then become part of that group of people in an elevator? No, not really. This is a group of people standing together, but they do not form a group. They can start forming a group, though, when the situation changes. So when they, for example, get stuck in an elevator, then all of a sudden group processes start occurring. Because there's a dependency going on. People start looking at each other, they start interacting and they can form a group. So the definition of a group is that it's two or more individuals. So already with two people you can form a group, two or more individuals that interact with each other and also influence each other. So the moment you get stuck in an elevator, you start speaking to each other, interact with each other and you impact each other. Because one person that, for example, completely panics in the elevator, could have been me, that person is impacting the entire group. And also the person taking the lead, maybe getting on the phone, trying to call the technicians. That's group behavior going on, coordination, problem-solving in that situation. So this was the definition of groups to begin with. It's also the definition that's used in the book. But later on the definition of groups changed a little bit and the identity part of groups also started to become part of the definition of a group. So sometimes, or some researchers claim that groups do not even necessarily have to interact with each other, but they have to perceive themselves as us, like part of the in-group. So that can also be a group so that you don't even interact with each other, but that you know I am part of this group because it's part of my identity, it's part of who I am and it's us. Oftentimes us versus them. So the effect of groups has been studied for a long time, for ages. Actually the very first, you can argue, the very first social psychological experiment ever has been conducted on groups and especially on the impact of groups on our individual behavior. It was a study conducted by Norman Triplett and he studied the effect of groups on performance and he did so with Cyclist. So it's actually basically the start of sports psychology. So here you see the official graph of this experiment conducted in 1898. So it's really, really like more than a century ago. Here you see the graph and in this experiment that Triplett conducted, Cyclist had to race as fast as they could and they had to race either alone or in competition against someone else. And here you see the graph and the lowest line that's actually the slowest. So the Cyclist went the slowest when the Cyclist was racing him or herself. So I think this was only male participants. So it was the Cyclist alone was the slowest. The performance started increasing so better performance when the Cyclist raced against others. And this is actually one of the reasons why during, for example, the Olympics, we see races from people against each other because we know performance increases gets better when we compete against others. We feel much greater sense of urgency. At least that's what Triplett thought in 1989, that's 98, so that it was always a better performance when others were watching us. But quite suddenly over the century we got new information. We got information with studies, psychological studies on human beings, right? We're social psychologists interested in human behavior, but interestingly sometimes interesting insights come from experiments with animals and in this case very interesting animals, namely cockroaches. So cockroaches are actually also impacted by the presence of other cockroaches. So here you see basically the setup of an experiment conducted in 1969 with cockroaches. And here there were various conditions. This cockroach could reach a piece of food, a food item, and he could access the food item through a maze. And sometimes this maze was really simple, so you can see that over here, cockroaches can immediately already see the food item and easily access it. And if this cockroach was going through the maze, getting the food item by himself, you see that the performance was pretty good 41 seconds for this cockroach to reach the food item. But then there was another condition in which there were, ah, joy, more cockroaches. And then you see what happens if the cockroach wants to reach a food item in the presence of other cockroaches. And you see that the performance gets better. Just like the first experiment done by triplet, when more cockroaches are present, performance, he speeds up. Of course, he's in a hurry. He wants to reach the food item before the others do. So then all of a sudden he can reach the food item in 33 seconds. But now let's look at the other conditions, the complex conditions. So here you see the maze is a bit trickier. It's not tricky for human beings, but it is tricky for a cockroach. Then if a cockroach alone has to reach the food item, it will take him 110 seconds. But if other cockroaches are present, then all of a sudden the performance impairs, gets worse. So he's actually slower with other cockroaches present with reaching the food item in a complex maze. And this is basically the summary of the theory on social facilitation. So social facilitation bear with me here. So it's the mere presence of others. So other people are present or other cockroaches. You can also, you know, it's also a theory applicable to cockroaches. So if you have to perform with others present, arousal increases. So we get a little bit turned up, you know, we get a little bit excited. Our blood starts flowing and it can have two consequences. On the one hand, we see it increase our performance on well-learned tasks or simple tasks. Things that we can easily do by going through a very simple maze. But it impairs our performance on poorly learned or difficult tasks. So whether or not other people or other cockroaches impair or improve our behavior really depends on how difficult it is what we have to do. But before we zoom into the difficulty, let me point your attention to this part of the model. It increases our arousal. Basically, the presence of others leads us to feel, you know, excited, to feel, you know, a bit nervous. But why is that? Why do we feel nervous when others are around us? So where does this arousal come from? There's various theories on that. So let me now just continue talking about humans instead of cockroaches. So the first theory states that we often feel evaluated when others are present. And sometimes we are actually evaluated by others. For example, during jury sports, then you have to perform, and others are watching you and they're also determining your outcome, whether or not you win a prize. So according to the evaluation apprehension perspective, if you evaluate it, then we get a little bit nervous. Right? Makes sense. Second theory is that we get distracted. Because if other people are there and we have to perform even if they're not evaluating us, they're still looking at us. And I can assure you that I experienced this as well. If I give a lecture to a big group of students, for example, and not all students are quiet all the time, sometimes people talk while I'm talking. That's distracting. You know, you have basically two tasks then. You have the task of presenting, telling your story. And at the same time, you're also having the task of monitoring the audience, monitoring what is everybody else doing? How are they responding to what I'm doing? So that's the conflict distraction theory. So because you experience a conflict between doing the task and also, you know, watching the audience. So this distraction can also lead to a feeling of arousal because it just becomes more difficult, right? If you have to do something and other people are there watching at you, it's difficult because you have to monitor them as well. Final theory states that we become more alert if other people are present. So even if they're not watching us, not evaluating us, just knowing that other people are there makes our body become a bit vigilant, a bit alert, our blood starts flowing more, and that can have impact on, you know, also our bodily movements. For example, when soccer players take penalty kicks, I think especially Dutch soccer players, we are not very good at it like historically speaking, then they start over-analyzing their bodily movements also because they know everybody's watching and there's so much pressure on that moment and that actually leads them to a higher chance of them missing the goal. So these are the three theories that help us explain that we become aroused, basically, the moment that others are watching us. And when we become aroused, we get better at things that we can easily do and we get worse at things that we are, you know, having a difficulty with doing. Okay, so keep this in mind the next time you have to perform, do something, invite others if it's very simple for you and please do not invite others if it's still very difficult for you. Okay, that will definitely impact your performance. So let's now move to another topic. We now know that the presence of others influences our individual performance. But what if we have to work together? You could, you know, logically think when you do things together, it's less work and with all the skills of the individuals in the group combined, the end result will definitely be better, right? Well, of course not. It's social psychology, nothing is straightforward. So no, it's not the case that we always perform better the moment that we are in groups and we have to work together. And this was demonstrated already in 1930 by a French agricultural engineer, so not a psychologist, an agricultural engineer, Maximilian Ringelman, and he showed that the productivity of groups is often reduced when the size of the group increases. And he demonstrated this in a very, very clever way. What he did was he, you know, made this, you know, quite complicated apparatus. It's an engineer, so he could just make this. And it was a sort of a rope pooling device. So participants could take place in this rope pooling device on places one, two, three, four, five, or six. And they were instructed to pull the rope as hard as they could. Okay, so pull as hard as you can. And these participants were actually blindfolded while they were in this apparatus. And there were lets to believe that others were present as well. Sometimes they were told there's one other person also standing before you. Or sometimes even there are five other persons standing before you. And Ringelman wanted to know what the effect is of making participants believe that there's other people present and whether that impacted participants' performance. So how hard they were pooling the rope. And he already showed this very interesting effect coined as the Ringelman effect in 1930 that the potential, if you combine all the forces of all the people, that's a red line, you would think with every other person that is present, we start pooling, you know, you have more force, you can pool harder. But in fact that's not the case. So people start decreasing their efforts the moment they start believing that others are there. And the more people are there, the less hard people start pooling the rope. Okay, and this experiment has been replicated many times. For example, I think this is a very cool study conducted in 1979 in which the assignments, the instructions to the participants was, again these participants were blindfolded. They also had earphones on their heads. They were placed in a certain room and they were told, please make as much sound as you can. Make as much noise as you can do. And you can do that either by cheering or clapping, so two different conditions here. And they were also misled to believe that there were other people present in the room, which was in fact not the case. So the moment participants thought that there was no one in the room, they made the loudest noise. So whether it was cheering or clapping, they really put in all their effort when they thought they were alone in the room. And the moment they start believing that there was another person or even more people there, then you see that their sound, the volume basically goes down. And what is interesting to point out here is that it's, you know, they don't really have an excuse. It's not like they have to coordinate something. The instructions were very clear. Just make as much noise as you can. So it's not a coordination problem. It's really a motivation problem. The moment others are there, we just apparently become less motivated to perform and to really put in our efforts. And this is called social loathing. So the moment that our efforts basically, our motivation to perform goes down when other people are present. This is called social loathing. And this is also one of these social psychological phenomena that has been replicated over and over again. Here you see the results of a meta-analysis of different studies on social loathing. Here are the results. There are 49 studies in total involving more than 4,000 participants. And here it revealed that the efforts that people put in goes down. So loathing increases basically. The effort goes down as the size of the group increases. So the more people are present, the less motivated we are to work hard. And here you see something that we call a floor effect. So in the last lecture, we also saw a ceiling effect. Here's a floor effect. So from the moment that there are approximately six people there, we just lose our motivation and we don't really perform to the best of our capacities anymore. And it doesn't really matter if it's 10 people in the room or 15 or 16. Basically, we just lost our motivation and we don't really perform well anymore. So social loathing is something that happens. Often, I bet that you've also been in situations in which you experience social loathing from yourself or maybe from other classmates that you feel like we're now in the group and nobody's really working hard to perform well in the group. So that's due to social loathing. So to summarize this part, what is the effect of others on our performance? Do others increase our performance or impair our performance? Well, it really depends. So here you see this very complicated model, but it's basically a summary of everything I just told you. So when others are present, the first thing we have to ask ourselves is, do we see our individual efforts being evaluated? So are other people watching us? If this is the case, we go to the upper part of this model. Individual efforts can be evaluated. Then we experience arousal. So that's because of alertness, evaluation, apprehension, distraction, conflict, leads all to arousal. And then our performance on simple task is improved and our performance on complex task is impaired. Then the lower part of the model is basically what happens if we don't feel evaluated, if we feel basically invisible in the group, then something completely different occurs. We don't experience evaluation apprehension. We don't feel like someone is watching us. We are relaxed. We are not aroused at all. We're totally chill. And then we see that we actually start performing worse on very simple tasks, but we become better at complex tasks because we are relaxed and we can actually perform better if we have to do something difficult by ourselves. Okay. So, yeah, this is basically the summary of this graph. So the key elements here, that's something that you have to keep in mind. What are really important parts of impact of others on our performance? It's whether or not we are being evaluated, whether or not we feel arousal, and how complex the task is. Before I close, I want to give you some key advice on how to do with social loathing because especially in student life, you often have to work together with groups. And there's definitely going to be moments that you are going to be either the one, you know, chilling out and not putting in the effort, or you're the one that actually still wants to, or is very motivated to work hard, but you feel like your group members are slacking, are loathing. They are not really putting in the work. So what can you do then? How can we still, how can we prevent social loathing and motivate people? There's basically three things that we can do. First of all, it really matters what the nature basically of the task that you're working on. If the task is really fun, super challenging, then people are naturally, intrinsically motivated to do well because we just like doing it, right? So make sure that the task that you're doing is enjoyable for the whole group. So make sure it's an interesting topic, something that you really are interested in figuring out. It really matters to prevent social loathing. Secondly, group cohesiveness. There's less loathing if you work together with a cohesive team, so with people that you know and that you like. Of course, you cannot always choose this, but then you can sort of work on ways to make the group more cohesive and try to come up with some sort of group identity to increase group cohesiveness. And finally, identifiable contributions. That's basically, I think, definitely the best advice I can give you. Make contributions identifiable. So if you have to work together, divide the task, say you are responsible for this part, you are responsible for that part, and then you can also really make sure that you can address people if something went wrong, you know where it went wrong, and then you cannot really slack anymore and you still can evaluate others on their performance. So keep this in mind. The next time you have a group assignment to work on.