Jaymie Ticknor Intro Sociology 1510 Sect 900 8 October 2013 Chapter 6 Group Organizations Types of Groups Groups behave differently from individuals Group Size Effect effect of sheer numbers in the group independent of the effects of their own personalities awareness as we Group two or more individuals who interact share goals and norms and have a subjective Social Categories certain gatherings are not groups in the strict sense may also be audiences Dyads and Triads Group Size Effects Dyad group consisting of exactly two people Triad consists of three interaction often end up as two against one This minor distinction first scrutinized by Georg Simmel can have critical consequences for group behavior was interested in discovering the effects of size on groups and found that the mere difference between two and three people spawned entirely different group dynamics a new dyad is formed plus an isolate making a triad Triadic Segregation tendency for triads to segregate into a pair and an isolate single person a triad tends to segregate into a coalition of the dyad against the isolate Simmel coined the principle of tertius gaudens meaning the third one gains Group Size Effects effects of group number on group Primary and Secondary Groups Charles Horton Cooley introduced the concept of the primary group a group consisting of intimate face to face interaction and relatively long lasting relationships Expressive Needs also called socioemotional needs human desires that the primary group gives like intimacy companionship and emotional support Secondary Groups larger in membership less intimate and less long lasting Instrumental Needs also called task oriented needs secondary groups serve this Reference Groups Membership Groups primary and secondary groups are groups to which members belong Reference Groups may or may not belong but use as a standard for evaluating your values attitudes and behaviors identification with these groups can strongly influence self evaluation and self esteem Clark and Clark suggested that when desegregation occurred Black children had lower self esteems compared to Black children who had multicultural educational programs in a positive way In groups when groups have a sense of themselves as us In Groups and Out Groups Out groups have a complementary sense of other groups as them Concept of in groups and out groups was elaborated by W I Thomas Attribution Theory principle that we all make inferences about the personalities of others Thomas F Pettigrew summarized the research on this theory showing that individuals commonly generate a significantly distorted perception of the motives and capabilities of other people s acts based on whether that person is an in group or out group member described the misperception as attribution error meaning errors made in attributing causes for people s behavior to their membership in a particular group All else being assumed equal we tend to perceive people in our in group positively and those in out groups negatively regardless of their actual personal characteristics Social Networks Social Network a set of links between individuals between groups or between other social units there is strength in weak ties between people and references Small World Problem networks make the world a lot smaller than you might think Travers and Milgram wanted to test whether a document could be routed via the U S postal system to a complete stranger more than 1 000 miles away using only a chain of acquaintances The average number of intermediate contacts was only 6 2 six degrees of separation A study of Black national leaders by Taylor shows that Black leaders form a very closely connected network one more closely knit than long established White leadership networks found that when considering only direct personal acquaintances one fifth of the entire national Black leadership network know each other directly as a friend or close acquaintance greater density Social Influence in Groups Philip Zimbardo called the conviction that one is impervious to social influences results in the not me syndrome when confronted with a description of group behavior that is disappointingly conforming and not individualistic most individuals counter that some people may conform to social pressure but not me Sociological experiments often reveal a dramatic gulf between what people think they will do and what they actually do The Asch Conformity Experiment Asch conformity experiment Solomon Asch showed that even simple objective facts cannot withstand the distorting pressure of group influence discovered that social pressure of a rather gentle sort was sufficient to cause an astonishing rise in the number of wrong answers First four were confederates collaborators with the experimenter who only pretended to be participants they gave correct answers for a few trials fifth student suspected nothing Fully one third of all students in the fifth position gave the same wrong answer as the confederates at least half the time forty percent gave some wrong answers only one fourth of the students consistently gave correct answers in defiance of the invisible pressure to conform showed more stress and discomfort than those who yielded to the apparent opinion of the group Sociological insight grows when we acknowledge the fact that fully one third of all participants will yield to the group experiment repeated many times will same results one third to one half of the participants make a judgment contrary to fact yet in conformity with the group Experiment revealed a group size effect the greater the number of individuals confederates giving an incorrect answer from five up to fifteen confederates the greater the number of subjects per group giving an incorrect answer Milgram Obedience Studies done from 1960 through 1973 by Stanley Milgram The Milgram Obedience Studies 65 percent of the volunteer subjects teachers went all the way to 450 volts on the shock machine predicted that only one tenth of 1 percent one in one thousand would actually go all the way to 450 volts Difference between what people think they will do and what they actually do Hannah Arendt suggested that evil on a giant scale is banal argued that to find the villain we need only look into ourselves The Iraqi Prisoners at Abu Ghraib Research Predicts Reality The soldiers who were not at all corrupt at least not more than average would indeed engage in horrible acts of torture particularly if they believed that