Module 76 Group Behavior

Flip It Video: Social Facilitation and Social Loafing

LEARNING TARGETS

• 76-1 Describe how the presence of others influences our actions via social facilitation, social loafing, and deindividuation.
• 76-2 Explain how group interaction can enable group polarization.
• 76-3 Discuss the role the Internet plays in group polarization.
• 76-4 Discuss how group interaction can enable groupthink.
• 76-5 Describe how culture affects our behavior.

• 76-1 How does the presence of others influence our actions via social facilitation, social loafing, and deindividuation?

Imagine standing in a room holding a fishing pole. Your task is to wind the reel as fast as you can. On some occasions you wind in the presence of another participant, who is also winding as fast as possible. Will the other’s presence affect your own performance?

In one of social psychology’s first experiments, Norman Triplett (1898) reported that adolescents would wind a fishing reel faster in the presence of someone doing the same thing. Although a modern reanalysis revealed that the difference was modest (Stroebe, 2012), Triplett inspired later social psychologists to study how others’ presence affects our behavior. Group influences operate both in simple groups—one person in the presence of another—and in more complex groups.