Our Behavior in Groups

Forming Groups: Why?

Group Decision Making
Contemporary Issues

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 What are groups?
Two or more individuals interacting, are interdependent,
and have come together to achieve a particular objective

Groups

Formal Informal

1. Command 1. Interest
2. Task 2. Friendship

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 Why people join groups?

1. Security
2. Status
3. Self-esteem
4. Affiliation
5. Power
6. Goal achievement

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 Individual Behavior in Groups
• Let’s clap

• How many of us work efficiently when being part of a

group?
– Do all exert equal effort?

• Quite common in case of additive tasks – all contribute to a

single output
 some work hard while others goof-off, doing less
than what they might do if working alone
 Social Loafing

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 Individual Behavior in Groups

• Does presence of others affects your performance?

– Simple or familiar vs. complex or less familiar tasks
– Social Facilitation and Social Inhibition

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 Processes that affect members in a group

• Conformity
– Type of social influence in which individuals change their
attitudes or behavior in order to adhere to
– Asch’s conformity experiment (1951, 1955)
– With respect to conformity – cohesiveness – is the degree of
attraction felt by an individual towards an influencing group
• Compliance
– A form of social influence involving direct request from one
member to another
• Obedience
– A form of social influence in which one member simply orders
one or more members to perform some actions
– Milgram’s experiment (1965)

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 Aspects of the group that affect its members

• Role
– sets of behaviors that individuals occupying specific positions within
a group are expected to perform (leader, deviant, follower, Secretary,
Treasurer)
• Status
– position or rank within a group (nominal, figurative, real, king-maker)
• Norms
– rules within a group indicating how its members should or should
not behave (ends justify means)
• Cohesiveness
– all forces (factors) that cause group members to remain in the group
(brand, type of work ‘innovation’)

The Prison Experiment

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 Decision Making in Groups
• Strengths
– More complete/holistic information
– Increased diversity of views
– Increased acceptance of a solution

• Weaknesses
– Time consuming
– Conformity pressures
– Dominated by one or few members
– Ambiguous responsibility

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 Primary inhibitors of efficient group decision making

• Groupthink
– When norm of consensus overrides the realistic appraisal of alternative
courses of action,
– and full expression of deviant, minority, or unpopular views

• Groupshift
– When a discussion leads members towards extremes
– Conservatives: CAUTIOUS, Aggressive: RISKY
– Due to: Comfort, Diffusion of responsibility

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 Traps in Decision Making
1. Anchoring
2. Status Quo
3. Sunk Cost
4. Confirming Evidence
5. Framing
6. Estimating and forecasting

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How perception influences individual decision
making
• It’s ironical that,
– on one hand, our cognitive abilities are impressive in many
respects;
– on the other hand, we are prone to errors that frequently prevent
us from recognizing even relatively simple solutions
• Hence, even intelligent and highly trained people are not
immune to errors that affect their ability to think and
reason effectively
– It might be that, because of n number of constrains imposed by
the situation, people might miss out on some very relevant
perspectives
 Methods of Problem Solving

• Trial and Error – Thomas Edison tried thousands of light bulb

filaments before stumbling upon the one that worked
• No organization, no preparation – try everything and
anything until something works
• Algorithm – A methodical, step-by-step, logical rule or procedure
• Heuristics – A simple, thinking-strategy (which often allows
efficient problem solving) by adding common sense shortcuts to
step-by-step procedures
• Insight – a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a
problem
 Decision Making
• We usually make decisions on basis of:
– Utility: value of given outcome
– Probability: likelihood you’ll achieve it
But, how are decisions actually made in organizations…

• Are decisions rational*?

*consistent with or based on stepwise reasoning

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• Generally most decisions in the real world do not follow a rational model
For instance, individuals are usually content to find an acceptable or
reasonable solution rather than an optimal one
Because the capacity of the human mind in formulating and solving
complex problems is far too small to meet the requirements of full
rationality, individuals therefore operate within the confines of bounded
rationality

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 Obstacles to Problem Solving
Common Biases and Errors

• Confirmation Bias – a tendency to search for answers

and information that confirms one’s own preconceptions
The defendant must be guilty because they are of a certain
race, gender, age, etc. Since all men are _______, then he
must have done _________. You will look at all of the
evidence with this in mind, and you will conclude guilt
because it fits with what you already “know”
 paying attention only to evidence that confirms a
belief
 Confirmation Bias can lead to overconfidence or a
tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and
judgments
• Fixation An inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective
This impedes problem solving
Two examples of fixation are mental set and functional
fixedness

• Belief Perseverance
 The tendency to cling to beliefs even after they have
been discredited
• Mental Set
 A tendency to approach a problem in a particular way,
especially if that way was successful in the past
• Gamblers’ Fallacy – the belief that if an event hasn’t happened for a while it
must happen soon because of the law of averages
• Illusory Correlation – the perception that associations and cause–effect
relationships exist when the evidence is non-existent
– e.g. correlation between positive characteristics and political party we support and between
negative characteristics and political party we dislike