Demand Characteristics: A Pitfall in Research.
Why Groups and Prejudices Form So Easily: Social Identity Theory. This classic social psychology experiment shows how little excuse people need to form into groups and start discriminating against others. People’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and frequently disturbing. As soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups. POWER. CONFORMITY. Essentials of Group Psychology. How groups form, conform, then warp our decision-making, productivity and creativity.
When we’re in a group other people have an incredibly powerful effect on us. Groups can kill our creativity, inspire us to work harder, allow us to slack off, skew our decision-making and make us clam up. The keys to understanding human behaviour—our lives as citizens, as workers, as friends—are in the research on group psychology, which PsyBlog has been exploring over the past few months. This post provides an overview and you can follow the links to explore the experiments that reveal the power groups hold over us.