CS 160: Lecture 18
Administrivia
- Hand in HE of one other group’s project on Thursday.
- Put your project in your class (unix) account in the public_html directory.
Social Psychology
- It helps explain much about collaborative work, which are among the most difficult aspects of knowledge work.
Mere presence effects
- Simply being near others can lead to improved performance, e.g. Triplett’s fishing observations.
- Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes the opposite happens.
Mere presence
- Stress, anxiety or stimulation increase physiological arousal, and arousal speeds up behavior.
- The presence of others pushes these buttons…
- But increased speed can also increase errors, so it can be bad on difficult tasks.
Mere presence
- Mere presence isn’t quite the right idea.
- The presence of a blindfolded subject didn’t increase arousal, and didn’t affect performance.
- The presence of others evaluating or competing with us is what matters.
Attribution
- How do we attach meaning to other’s behavior, or our own? This is called attribution.
- E.g. is someone angry because something bad happened, or because they are hot-tempered?
Attribution: ourselves
- Lets start with ourselves, how good are we at figuring out our emotions?
- Schacter: it depends strongly environmental and physiological factors, and others near us.
- The bottom line is that we can feel strong emotion, but struggle to recognize it as happiness or anger.
Attribution theory
- Attribution theory concerns itself with cause: was this behavior caused by personality, or environment?
- Actor-Observer effect:
- When I explain my own behavior, I rely on external explanations, “monsters took my shoes”
- When I explain others’ behavior, I’m more likely to attribute it to personality and disposition, “bad kid”
Administrivia
- Hand in HE of one other group’s project on Thursday.
- Put your project in your class (unix) account in the public_html directory.
Social Comparison
- We need to make comparisons to make judgements about people. Three rules:
- Limitation: qualities must be observable and comparable to be attributed.
- Organization: we use categories to describe and think about people; friendly, studious, careless etc.
- Meaning: categories of personality must make sense, e.g. friendly and cooperative go together, friendly and hostile do not.
Groups
- Groups are a strong influence on our behavior.
- A “reference” group is one we share a psychological connection with, e.g. a club or honor society we aspire to join.
- We compare our selves to reference groups to make self-assessments.
Groups
- Groups give us value in several ways:
- They provide us norms for behavior (informational function)
- They satisfy interpersonal needs (interpersonal function)
- They provide us with concrete support, resources, help (material function)
Groups and Motivation
- Groups increase motivation in two ways
- First, the social interaction with the group intensifies individual motivation, and sometimes generates new individual motives.
- Second, the group can cause group goals and motives to be created. E.g. group maintenance is goal most groups have.
Group goals
- Goals can be either short-term or long-term.
- Long-term goals are harder to manage and maintain and generally have less effect on group behavior.
- Short-term goals are strong force in motivating and reinforcing group performance.
Group goals
- The composition of the group can strongly affect its goals.
- E.g. a group united by profession will tend to adopt goals related to the profession’s methods.
- Groups often have subgroups that wield influence over the main group. They need not be majorities.
Group experiences
- Previous experience affects goal-setting.
- Groups that have succeeded are more likely to raise goals, groups that have failed are unlikely to lower them.
Effectiveness of Goals
- Unfortunately, its hard to have long-term goals that are both clear, and accepted by everyone (so long-term goals are either fuzzy, or partly accepted).
- Short-term goals with measurable criteria, e.g. improving the help system, improving speed, are more likely to be acceptable and successful.
Summary
- Mere presence influences speed of performance, through evaluation and competition.
- Attributions of behavior causes have an actor-observer effect.
- Social comparison is how we make judgements.
- Groups influence our perception of self and others through norms (reference groups).
- Groups influence behavior as well.