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Class 12 Social Influence and Group Processes: cheat sheet
CBSE Psychology. What makes a group, why people join, Tuckman’s stages, roles, norms, status and cohesiveness, types of groups, social facilitation and loafing, groupthink and polarisation.
Key ideas
- A group is two or more interacting, interdependent people with shared goals, roles, norms and a sense of belonging; a crowd has none of this structure.
- Groups form through proximity, similarity and common goals; people join for security, status, self-esteem, needs, goals and information.
- Group structure has roles (expected behaviour), norms (unspoken rules), status (ascribed or achieved) and cohesiveness (the “we feeling”).
- Groups can be primary or secondary, formal or informal, ingroups or outgroups; Tajfel showed people favour even a trivial ingroup.
- Others present can improve a well-learned task (social facilitation), but pooled effort can drop (social loafing).
- Groupthink (Janis) is a drive for agreement that overrides careful judgement; polarisation makes a group’s first view stronger.
Remember
| Tuckman’s stages | forming → storming → norming → performing → adjourning |
| Social loafing (Latané) | each member’s share = group total ÷ members; fall = alone − share |
| Reducing loafing | make each effort identifiable, raise commitment and importance, build cohesiveness |
| Preventing groupthink | reward disagreement, look at alternatives, bring in outside experts |
| Team | complementary skills and mutual accountability |
Watch out
- Calling any crowd a group: a group needs interaction, interdependence and structure.
- Putting storming before forming or after norming.
- Mixing up social loafing (less effort in a group) with social facilitation (better performance when watched).
Worked example
Suppose students clap as loudly as they can: alone, each makes 15 units of noise; in a group of 4, the total is 36 units. (a) What is each member’s average? (b) By how much did each person’s effort fall? (c) Name the process.
Working: 36 ÷ 4; 15 − 9
Answer: (a) 9 units (b) 6 units (c) social loafing
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