The list grows ever longer: Names like Harry Lew, Chucky Stenzel, Chad Saucier, Gabe Higgins, Donna Bedinger, J. B. Joynt…and now Robert Champion. Its the list of people killed by hazing. Champion died of “blunt force trauma” that occurred during the FAMU marching band’s “Crossing Bus C” ritual, when his classmates punched and slapped him as he walked down the aisle of the band bus. He suffered so many injuries, inflicted by so many hands, that prosecutors charged 11 members of the band with felony hazing.

Hazing should never happen, but it does. Hank Nuwer’s Wrongs of Passage documents in excruciating detail the way fraternity pledges at some universities are ritually beaten, ridiculed, harassed, and coerced into abusing alcohol and drugs. New members of sports teams are subjected to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. The recent suicide of Marine Lance Corporal Harry Lew has been linked to hazing. Marching bands, clubs, schools, businesses, even churches: they psychologically and physically harm their newest members.

Hazing is an entrenched group practice, and has been documented in ancient and modern societies and in all parts of the world. It’s a remnant of the modern-day group’s origins in the primal horde, designed to humble newcomers, remind them of their lowly status, and teach them to respect the group’s chain of command and traditions. Hazing legitimizes the abuse of power by group leaders, who claim the practice will unify the group, weed out the weak and uncommitted, and give newcomers a chance to prove their worth (Cimino, 2011).

But hazing is the wrong way to achieve any of these outcomes. Research in social psychology, including the classic study conducted by Eliott Aronson and Jud Mills in the 1950s, suggests that individuals rate positively groups which cause them to suffer, but other research indicates people like groups that support and reward them even more (Lodewijkx, van Zomeren, & Syroit, 2005). When Raalte, Cornelius, Linder, and Brewer (2007) examined the effects of two type of initiations—ones that involved group outings, swearing an oath, performing in skits, and doing community service and ones that involved kidnapping and abandonment, verbal abuse, physical punishment (spankings, whippings, and beatings), degradation and humiliation, sleep deprivation, alcohol abuse, running errands, and exclusion—they discovered the positive forms increased group unity. The negative forms backfired, creating tension and disunity in the group.

Yet hazing marches on, in part because it so psychologically compelling. Most who haze know that intentionally harming others is wrong. But hazing is sanctioned by the traditions of the group, so it is transformed into a sacred duty. If hazing was called by its correct names—torture and bullying—people might be more reluctant to carry on the grand tradition. Those who are hazed are part of the paradox as well, for they seem to be willing victims who embrace their own abuse. But even the participants in Stanley Milgram’s (1963) famous study of obedience misunderstood the cause of their own actions—they did not realize the power of a situation that so few of them could resist. Like Milgram’s subjects, victims of hazing are enmeshed in a group that severely limits their capacity to act of their own free will. A New York Times article discussing the tragic hazing of Robert Champion quoted a former band member as saying “much of the hazing is voluntary.” It is voluntary in the sense that Milgram’s subjects freely agreed to shock another person to death.

Lone individuals are capable of doing great harm to others. People like Timothy McVeigh, Seung Huo Cho, Ted Bundy, James Earl Ray, Ted Kaczynski, David Berkowitz (the “son of Sam”) are the source of much of the world’s evil. But if you discover harm that is truly senseless, inhumane, and massive in scale, you will likely find a group is to blame. Hazing is a violent, aggressive action; a morally repugnant form of torture and extreme bullying. Hazing is unlawful in many jurisdictions; people who have been hazed are victims of a crime. Hazing is dangerous and often lethal; each year young people are killed or seriously injured in hazing incidents. And hazing does not even yield the effects that it was introduced to generate. When groups identify shared goals, find ways to improve their performance, and identify sources of conflict, they become more cohesive. When they victimize their newest members, they irreparably undermine the group’s unity. Hazing is one form of group behavior that we no longer need.

References

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effects of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181.

Cimino, A. (2011). The evolution of hazing: Motivational mechanisms and the abuse of newcomers. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 11, 241-267.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.

Nuwer, H. (1999). Wrongs of passage: Fraternities, sororities, hazing, and binge drinking. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Lodewijkx, H. F. M., & Syroit, J. E. M. M. (1997). Severity of initiation revisited: Does severity of initiation increase attractiveness in real groups? European Journal of Social Psychology, 27, 275-300.

Van Raalte, J. L., Cornelius, A. E., Linder, D. E., & Brewer, B. W. (2007). The relationship between hazing and team cohesion. Journal of Sport Behavior, 30, 491-507.

But I wasn’t ready for the physics of groups. Yes, the physics of groups. I wanted to see who had cited the classic 1969 Moscovici, Lage, and Naffrechoux paper, which found evidence of delayed influence of minority in a “reverse-Asch” situation. Cited by 295 other papers, I had a look at those published more recently–after 2008.  And the title that stood out on the second page of the list: “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities” by Xie, Sreenivasan, Korniss, Zhang, Lim, and Szymanski published in Physical Review E, a journal of the American Physical Society. Physicists, it turns out, have decided that human groups are interesting systems, and that their theories of structure, change, and dynamics apply to collections of people as much as they do to collections of rocks, planets, or microscopic particles. And, because I have not kept up my subscription to Physica, International Journal of Modern Physics, and Review of Modern Physics, I was unaware of the strides being made by the real scientists. Mason, Conrey, and Smith (2007) called out “heads up” in their analysis of social influence as a multidirectional flow system of dynamic networks, but even their careful review of four separate models of such systems did not prepare me for the degree of theoretical interest exhibited by physicists in group processes.

The Xie et al.  paper does not present data that they collected examining opinion shifts. Rather, the work is theoretical, applying principles based on physical systems to interpersonal ones. Specifically, they apply the “two-opinion variant of the naming game (NG)” and test its fit using Erdos-Renyi random graphs. Apparently, earlier investigations by physicists of social influence (Galam is mentioned frequently) found this model described hypothetical changes in attitudes in social networks well, but their work focused on adding “rigidity” to the model: the individual, who they label the “zealot” who is immune from influence.  Their abstract sounds like social psychology (“We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence.”), even if the paper reads like Bibb Latane’s 1981 American Psychologist social impact theory paper on steroids.

Intrigued, I cast the Google Scholar net more widely, and uncovered an entire subfield of physics devoted to group-level processes. Fortunately, a very detailed paper by Castellano, Fortunato, and Lorento (2009)  provided a very comprehensive review of attempts to apply method and theory from physics to “collective phenomena emerging from the interactions of individuals as elementary unites in social structures” (p. 591). They examine such processes as “the dynamics of opinions,” “cultural dissemination,” “crowd dynamics,” “the emergence of hierarchies,” “social spreading phenomena,” and “what is becoming established as ‘human dynamics’. (p. 634).  I’ll quote a few sections, to give a flavor of the work:

• p. 594:  Generally speaking, the drive toward order is provided by the tendency of interacting agents to become  more alike. This effect is often termed “social influence” in the social science literature (Festinger et al., 1950) and can be seen as a counterpart of ferromagnetic interaction in magnets. Couplings of antiferromagnetic type, i.e., pushing people to adopt a state different from the state of their neighbors, are also important in some cases and will be considered.

• p. 596: Beyond its relevance as a physics model, the Ising ferromagnet can be seen as a simple model for opinion dynamics, with agents influenced by the state of the majority of their interacting partners. Consider a collection of N spins (agents) si that can assume two values ±1. Each spin is energetically pushed to be aligned with its nearest neighbors. The total energy is  H = – 1/2 sum (i, j) Si/Sj, where the sum runs on the pairs of nearest-neighbors spins.

• p. 598:  The first opinion dynamics designed by a physicist was a model proposed by Weidlich
  1971. The model is based on the probabilistic framework of sociodynamics, discussed in Sec. II.C. Later on, the Ising model made its first appearance in opinion dynamics
  Galam et al., 1982; Galam and Moscovici, 1991.

• p. 624:  To study the collective motion of large groups of organisms, the concept of self-propelled particles
  SPP has been introduced
  Vicsek et al., 1995; Czirók and Vicsek, 1999, 2000. SPP are particles driven by an intrinsic force, produced by an energy depot that is internal to the particles, as occurs in real organisms.

• p. 629: Dominance relationships seem to be determined by the outcome of fights between individuals. Laboratory experiments on various species hint at the existence of a positive feedback mechanism
  Hogeweg and Hesper, 1983; Chase et al., 1994; Theraulaz et al., 1995, according to which individuals who won more fights have an enhanced probability to win future fights as compared to those who were less successful
  winner or loser effects.

I know.  It seems like a spoof.  They mention in their analysis this caveat: “It is worth remarking that, even if we have done our best to mention relevant social science literature and highlight connections to it, the main focus of this work remains a description of the statistical physics approach to social dynamics.”  To me, that would be like me saying something like “we are going to discuss interplanetary motion and celestial dynamics. We will do our best to mention the work of astronomers, but we will probably just talk about conclusions we drew by standing outside in the back yard on a dark night. “

But roles, as a basic concept, offer an explanation for two of the most fascinating facts about people in groups.

First, when people join a group, they sometimes seem to leave their personalities and individual proclivities behind.  The quiet recluse, taciturn by nature, may become quiet convivial when given responsibility for organizing the group’s annual fund raising event. The otherwise mild mannered colleague may become habitually critical of process when taking part in group discussions.  The staffer with the messiest office may become methodical and precise when elected the group’s secretary.  Sometimes (not always, of course), there is a discontinuity between who the person is, when alone, and who that person becomes when in a group: an individual discontinuity effect (paying, of course, homage to Chet Inkso).

Second, many groups operating in a range of different circumstances–children at play, executives debating a course of action, a jury rendering a decision about guilt, a sports team huddling before a play–exhibit certain dissimilarities in the types of behaviors members display.  Much has been said about the pronounced capacity for individuals to conform to others’ behavior, and certainly Asch and others have demonstrated that yes: people will make certain that their opinions match those of others in the group.  But, in organized, long-term groups, people do NOT act similarly to one another.  They, in fact, differentiate themselves from others in the group by displaying certain behaviors consistently–behaviors that others in the group do not enact. Over time, someone will be the person who seems bored by the group.  Someone will consistently keep the group on course.  Someone will be the harmonizer who intervenes to soothe the group’s feelings.  In current slang, everyone in the group becomes “that guy”: the person who can be expected to enact some specific type of response. Or, as Romans 12:4 explains, “For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same purpose”.

The concept of a role explains both of these tendencies.  A role requires certain behavior, and when the individual adopts the role–or is forced into it–he or she must enact the required behaviors or suffer rejection by the group.  This role enactment requirement causes the individual discontinuity effect–the display of behaviors in the group that are not in keeping with individualistic proclivities.  A role exists, in the first place, because the group (a) requires the actions performed by the role holder to function; (b) the requirements are shared/distributed among members, because no one person can fulfill them all; and (c) these functions are so essential that group must be reasonably certain that someone will perform them.  Because of the continuities in the demands that groups face across situations–the need for coordination, for communication, for influence, for unity, for stability, for conflict management–certain roles are common across groups: hence, continuities in roles emerge.

But what does it mean to say something has a “structure?” And what does it mean to say a group has a structure?

1. The structure of a thing is the relatively fixed arrangement of and relations among the individual elements (parts).  Structures tie together/join/coordinate/link discrete (singular) components in an integrated, meshed system of relationships.  Structures regulate the members ( a member, after all, is a very general word. It literally means any one of the constituent elements of a structure, and so describes the timbers used in a building, the organs of the body, the parts in a mathematical equation) in a way that promotes coordinated action, eliminates or at least reduces disturbances in the mechanics of the operation system, and increases the systems’ durability and capacity.

2. A group’s structure defines its features, the functions of its constituent members, and the relationships among those members. Applied to a human group, the elements of 1. above suggest a group’s structure is the relatively fixed arrangement of and relations among the members.  Group structures tie together members in an integrated network of relationships that facilitates coordination and regulates interdependencies, eliminates or at least reduces disturbances in the mechanics of the operation system, and increases the systems’ durability and capacity for dealing with tasks/issues that require a concerted (group-level) response.

3. One implication of the idea of “structures” is that members are depersonalized–like a stack of 2X4s to be used in building a wall, the shingles for a roof, or the planks that will be nailed side-by-side to build a floor.  When a group is structured the individual members must have features that make them fit to their particular function in the overall design/architecture.  When a group is structured it is modularized, and the individuals are the modules who can be replaced easily–in a highly structured groups any given member can be swapped in and out, for what matters is the result rather than who makes the result possible. As a group becomes structured the dependency on any specific, unique individual is diminished.

4. Structures mandate/require certain elements by their very design. A house, for example, requires a foundation, a roof, walls, and structural elements (bearing walls, beams). Similarly, if a group is structured, it will requires certain elements or features. These features are generally termed roles.

5. If structures link elements, some manner of creating that link must be identified and implemented to build the structure.  For human groups, the group’s structure creates connections among the roles and those who occupy them, creating an integrated system of relationship based on affect (liking, disliking), respect (prestige, admiration), communication (sharing of information).

6. Structures create uniformity (similarity) across different groups. Consider, for example, houses.  Aside from such novel designs, such as geodesic domes or modularized housing, most houses are of two varieties: stick and wall.  With a stick house, the load of the elements of the house (the floors, roof, contents) is transferred through beams (horizontal elements) and columns (vertical elements) through to the ground (foundation). In bearing-wall type houses, the walls themselves carry the load to the foundation.  Once one knows the house’s structure, one knows much about the nature of the house, including how many windows it can have in its outer walls, its flexibility in terms of renovation, and the reasons for its features.  Similarly, if groups tend to have common structures–centralized, for example, or hierarchical–then much is known about the group.

7. Highly structured objects, such as houses, are actually called “structures.”  In some cases social scientists who believe that society and its commonly viewed features–families, educational and educational systems, mechanisms of governance–are described as social structures as well. A group, then, does not just have a structure, it is a structure.

8. We have, as well, a few other words we can use in place of the word structure. We can speak of the “anatomy” of a group, or the group’s underlying “framework,”or even “scaffold.”  Each of these terms supplies nuance to the analysis, but in some cases the analogy drags in meaning that we did not intend–and agreement on meaning is even lower than that of structure.  For example, framework is a supporting structure of some type, but is relatively rudimentary. In many cases, too, the framework may be removed after the structure itself is completed. Anatomy, used by a physician, likely has the same meaning as a structure, but to many anatomy is a description of the parts of the body, with less focus on their integration into a functioning biological organism.  Scaffolds, finally, provide access to portions of the structure, but they are external to it and are disassembled once the structure is stable and functioning.

9. Things that are part of a group’s structure are, in general, essential for the group’s existence. In a house, the decorative cornices “structures,” but in a weaker sense of the word. They can be removed, and the house would still function.  Removing the foundation, however, or the bearing walls, or the corner columns, and the house would collapse (eventually).  Structural elements are essential elements, for they reveal the basic nature of the group, rather than its aspects that add nuance to it or flesh it out.

9. A group’s structure defines the formation, arrangement, and articulation of the members of that group.  The group’s formation is its overall “design” or “architecture,” meaning its general configuration for unifying the constituent elements into a single unit–the group’s basic shape. The group’s arrangement describes is the manner in which the members are linked/joined to one another–the group’s network. The groups’s articulation is the degree of integration of the elements into a single integrated whole–the group’s structural cohesiveness.

For the last fifty years no pains have been spared to convince the inhabitants of the United States that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They perceive that, for the present, their own democratic institutions prosper, while those of other countries fail; hence, they conceive a high opinion of their superiority, and are not very remote from believing themselves to be a distinct species of mankind.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Psychologists have not exactly done much to help unmuddy the conceptual waters. When Geert Hofstede burst on the scene with a fist-full of surveys completed by diligent IBM employees working in countries scattter around the globe, he was careful to disentagle individualism (IDV) from related cultural differences, such as “power distance” and “masculinity.”  Cross-cultural psychologists took up the theme and applied it diligently–although primarily to explain why Japanese people are different from U.S. people–before personality psychologists decided that this dimension may apply not only to cultures, but to people within the cultures. So, the theory became a multi-level one, with differences in the definition of the concept when it is used at a societal level than when it is used at an individual level (see, for example, Fischer,  Vauclair, Fontaine, Schwartz, 2010).

The result of all this interest in the concept is that many variations in the definition and measurement of individualism and collectivism have emerged, with each one providing a bit different perspective on these concepts.  For example:

Hofstede: “Individualism is the opposite of Collectivism. Individualism stands for a society in which the ties between individuals are loose: a person is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family only. Collectivism stands for a society in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, which continue to protect them throughout their lifetime in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.” (Hofstede, Hofstede, Minkov, & Vinken, 2008, pp. 7-8).  He measures this dimension with these four items: “Please think of an ideal job, disregarding your present job, if you have one. In choosing an ideal job, how important would it be to you to (M1) have sufficient time for your personal or home life (individualistic), (M4) have security of employment (collective), (m6), do work that is interesting (individualistic), and (M9) have a job respected by your family and friends (collective).

Gaines, Marelich, Bledsoe, Steers, Henderson, and many more (1998) decide to remove family focus from individualism and collectivism, for good reason.  Most of the early analyses of individualism actually included a focus on family in the concept, but more recent researchers have assumed that (a) family = group and (b) Asian cultures are collectivistic and very family focused so family suggests collectivism.  Gaines et al. measure individualism with items such as “These days, the only person you can depend upon is yourself” and “I place personal freedom above all other values,” collectivism with items such as”I consider myself a team player” and “I believe in the motto, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall,” and familism with “My family always is there for me in time of need” and “I cannot imagine what I would do without my family.”

Triandis’s measure is very well-known, although he decided that it is important to split I/C into Vertical and Horizontal.  His four scales include: Horizontal individualism (1. I’d rather depend on myself than others. 3. I often do “my own thing.”), Vertical individualism (1. It is important that I do my job better than others.  2. Winning is everything.),  Horizontal collectivism (1. If a coworker gets a prize, I would feel proud. 4. I feel good when I cooperate with others.), and Vertical collectivism (1. Parents and children must stay together as much as possible. 4. It is important to me that I respect the decisions made by my groups.).

The Schwartz value scale is not exactly a measure of individualism/collectivism, but it predicts it fairly well (see Fisher et al., 2010).  And, the 10 values that Schwartz has been studying can be arranged along 2 dimensions, that are conceptually reminiscent of individualism and collectivism. Oishi and his colleagues (1998) explored the relationship between the Schwartz Values and Individualism/Collectivism, as measured by Triandis’s two dimensional approach that folds power and hierarchy into the mix. They found that Individualism was positively correlated significantly with power and achievement, but negatively with self-direction, universalism, and benevolence. Collectivism, in contrast, was correlated positively with tradition, conformity, and security, but negatively with self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, and power. Self-direction was negatively correlated with both.

Oyserman, Coon, and Kemmelmeier, 2002, to bring some order to the chaos, tracked down no fewer than 27 (!) individualism/collectivism scales and examined their content, and checked to see how well they predicted both societal level and person-level outcomes.  They identified 7 repeated themes in their analysis of individualism items, and 8 for collectivism.  For Collectivism, virtually all of the scales included an item pertaining to duty to the group and relatedness to others.   They also found that at least half of the scales included items related to relying on other people when making decisions, concern for maintaining group harmony, and preference for working with others in groups rather than alone.  Other, less frequently noted, elements are shown in the table and include belonging, context, and hierarchy).  Individualism, in contrast, was a more mixed bag.  Nearly all included an item that addressed freedom, self-sufficiency, personal independence.  However, no other themes appeared in more than half of the scales. The next most popular themes, mentioned in only a third, were personal achievement and self-knowledge. Competition was noted in only 15% of the individualism scales, for some obscure reason.  Theoretically, competition is stressed in most analyses of individualism, and was one of three scales used by Chen and West in their 2008 measure (along with independent and uniqueness.  Chen and West’s scale is relatively unique on the collectivism side, for it includes considering the implications of one’s decision for others, sharing positive outcomes with others, and avoiding doing embarrassing things so that others are not humiliated.

But back to Oyserman, Coon, and Kemmelmeier. They also examined the content of individualism and collectivism through a  review of previous studies that have examined the relationship between I and C and various kinds of outcomes.  This research suggests that differences in individualism and collectivism do not predict how many groups one belongs to, but these variables do predict the importance of groups for members.  Those who are individualistic interact with more groups, feel they can leave groups and join others more easily, and are more at ease with strangers than collectivists. Collectivists, as theory suggests, favoring the ingroup over the outgroup, prefer equality when distributing resources, and they are more likely to accommodate ingroup members. In organizational and work contexts those who are low in collectivism prefer to work alone and are more likely to perform solitary tasks more effectively. Studies of communication suggests individualism predicts an emphasis on direct, clear communication, where collectivism is associated with indirect communication that takes into account the other person’s feelings.

]]> http://donforsythgroups.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/individualismcollectivism-redux/feed/ 0 donforsyth Oyserman 2002 http://donforsythgroups.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/participant-observation-and-ethnography/ http://donforsythgroups.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/participant-observation-and-ethnography/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:55:48 +0000 Donelson Forsyth http://donforsythgroups.wordpress.com/?p=88 ]]> Participant observation — studying groups by actually joining them — has a long and distinguished history within the study of groups.  W. F. Whyte’s Street Corner Society is a classic, of course, but others include Festinger’s foray into an unusual, cult-like group discussed in When Prophecy Fails, Don Roy’s “Banana Time,” and Tobias Schneebaum’s Keep the River on Your Right.

Over the years, as the social science of groups has shifted in method and orientation, the world of ethnographic study has become increasing diverse, as researchers grapple with issues of objectivity, epistemology, and ethics.  Some modern ethnographers adhere, primarily, to the method’s original form–for they strive to describe the dynamics of cultural groups by taking part in those group’s activities.  Gary Alan Fine’s Morel Tales, for example, describes how mushroom hunters negotiate the fine line between supporting each other’s searches but also keeping their own best patches secret. Jennifer Lois’s (2003) Heroic Efforts discusses the five and a half years she spent as member of a mountain search and rescue squad, and her work yields wonderful insights into group-level emotions, the social processes that influence status allocations in groups that face danger, and the relationship between individual self-conceptions and group-level acceptance.  Sudhir Vankatesh’s (2008) Gang Leader for Day describe the four years Vankatesh spent with the Black Kings, a group of young men living in public housing in Chicago.  His analysis describes their world from within, for he never became part of the gang, but he was permitted to act as the gang’s leader for a day.  In the The Warcraft Civilization William Sims Bainbridge (2010) discusses the thousands of hours he spent at Maxrohn (a priest) and Catullus (a blood elf) in the online game world of WarCraft, and explains the complex dynamics of altruism, competition, and leisure in a virtual world.

Their work yields a particularly rich type of data: the actual words used by members in their discussions and conversations, impressions drawn from nonverbal expressions, information about the member’s appearance and location in relationship to each other, and the sequences of behaviors that unfold within the group over time.From their work we learn first hand about how a group manages its emotions when it must deal with a crisis, the way in which inner city gangs negotiate conflicts so that everyone’s economic interests are protected, and the development of a culture in an entirely virtual community of people who never meet face-to-face.  These ethnographers, true to the methods basic tenants, also organize their observations within a theoretical framework, drawing out conclusions that are relevant to such theories of interpersonal processes as edgework theory, status congruity theory, and social identity theory.  Their descriptions are subjective accounts of what transpired, but their subjectivity is minimized through attention to the record keeping, extensive training in observational procedures, and an extraordinary investment of time in the groups they are observing.

All these works can be considered ethnographic, but they avoid the drivel often found in many contemporary ethnographic writings. These researchers spend no time moaning about how unfair the world of science is, boasting of the supremacy of ethnography as the only legitimate method (for it admits its biases instead of denying them), or cloaking their conclusions with such opaque postmodern speak as “compositional studies,” “critical humanism,” “interpretive practice,” “testimonio and subalaternity,” and “emancipatory discourse” (all from titles in Denzin & Lincoln’s Handbook of Qualitative Research).  Instead, they describe as clearly as possible what they saw during their time within the groups.  Unlike some in the field of ethnography–who seem to be writing to impress themselves and to confuse the reader with useless verbiage and conceptual clutter–the best ethnographic researchers pursue the one goal we all share:  the explanation of the causes and consequence of interpersonal processes in groups.

[Postscript: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (edited by Denzin & Lincoln) runs to 1200 pages, with 45 chapters devoted to the "post-positivistic, hermeneutical approaches" to qualitiative research. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology (edited by Willig and Stainton-Roger) runs is a meager 600+ pages with some 30 odd (and I mean, odd) chapters.  Some of these chapters--the ones that avoid using terms such as "methodolatry," "recontextualizing," "Foucultian analysis," and "refunctioning"--offer some reasonable ideas on how to conduct ethnographic studies. ]

Their pronouncement leaves me wondering why I still subscribe to the APA/EPF journal Group Dynamics. I’m also wondering why, within the field of social psychology, there is a journal that focuses on relationships (Personal Relationships, impact factor .81), a journal that focuses on social cognition (Social Cognition, impact factor 1.75), one that examines social influence (Social Influence, impact factor .75), one that examines the self (Self and Identity, impact factor 1.06), and three that examine group-level processes (Group Dynamics, Impact factor .89, Small Group Research, impact factor 1.15, and Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, Impact factor 1.37).And why isn’t the 2010 Encyclopedia of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations edited by John M. Levine and Michael A. Hogg skinnier, instead of weighing in at 6 pounds, 2 volume, 998 pages, with over 300 entries?  And why is the 6th edition of group dynamics 730 pages long?

But Ross, Lepper, and Ward’s verdict is one that has been bandied about ever since the great Ivan Steiner asked “Whatever happened to the group in social psychology?” in his cleverly titled Journal of Experimental Social Psychology paper in 1974. He lamented the golden age of group dynamics–the 1950s–with its studies of communication networks, leadership, group decision-making, and performance in groups. (Hard as it may seem to believe today, Leon Festinger’s 1955 Annual Review chapter was titled Social Psychology and Group Processes.)

Steiner’s dismal outlook has been repeated by many commentators in the intervening years. Gwen Wittenbaum and Richard Moreland (2008), themselves researchers who study groups, admit the field is nearly static. Richard Hackman and Nancy Katz (2010, p. 1208) explain “small group research has migrated to the periphery of the field”. Brooke Harrington and Gary Alan Fine (2000) similarly conclude that researchers in social psychology, both in the sociological and psychological traditions, “express little interest in small groups as an organizing principle of social life” (p. 313).

Yet, others express a more Panglossian perspective on groups.  John Levine and Richard Moreland, in 1998, hope that “research on small groups is experiencing a renaissance within social psychology” (p. 448). In that same year Dominic Abrams and Michael Hogg wrote that “research in group and intergroup processes is being published at a disproportionately accelerating rate compared with the increase in social psychology as a whole” (p. 7). Which is it?

One reason for this diversity in opinions regarding the health of groups research is ambiguity about the definition of a group. Levine and Moreland (2012), for example, don’t think dyads are groups, and so they exclude any studies using paradigms that involve two interacting individuals from their analyses. Never mind that the study might be testing some theoretical perspective pertaining to such group-level processes as social comparison, power, leadership, communication, and so on–dyads aren’t groups. In consequence,if  you study diffusion of responsibility, negotiation, social facilitation, and one-to-one communication processes you aren’t studying group dynamics. (Kipling Williams (2010), by the way, takes a different perspective, in part because he considers his work on ostracism–which often involves one person rejecting another person–to be groups research. He probably also thought his studies of social loafing, which tested hypotheses about groups with two people working to contribute to a shared resource, to be groups research.)

A second reason for the differences in conclusions about the state of group dynamics as a field is ambiguity about what processes qualify as group processes and which ones should be excluded from consideration in the general category of groups and their dynamics. Wittenbaum and Moreland (2008), for example, include five basic topics when they offer up their comprehensive review of the state of groups research: group composition, group structure, group performance, conflict in groups, and the ecology. They also add, grudgingly, intergroup processes, but exclude others: affiliation, aggression in groups, collective behavior (e.g., crowds, gangs, etc.), conformity, contagion, crowding, family dynamics, group formation, group development, group-based identity, groups and therapeutic change, inclusion/exclusion, justice, leadership, negotiation, obedience, ostracism, perceptions of groups (entitativity), power, social comparison, social identity, social network analysis, status and hierarchy, and teams. Some of these topics may not fall squarely into the realm of group research, but all explore processes that are relevant to understanding the behavior of individuals when in groups.

The conclusion “interest in studying social processes within small groups has diminished over time” (Wittenbaum & Moreland, 2008, p. 187) is only reasonable when the list of topics has been whittled down to the most basic (and, arguably, most boring). A more generous interpretation of the field’s rightful domain of interests yields a far more positive conclusion. For example, Georginia Randsley de Moura, Tirza Leader, Joseph Pelletier, and Dominic Abrams (2008) reviewed 90,827 articles pertaining to social psychological topics published between 1935 to 2007 in over 60 journals. They discovered that a healthy percentage of those papers, 16.5%–about 15,000–pertained to groups. When they examined publication rates over time, they found evidence of a linear increase over that time period, with a particularly dramatic increase from the 1990s onward attributable, in part, to the increased integration of groups with studies of social cognition. This increase was particularly pronounced when they focused on the leading journals within the field of social psychology. They went back, through the preceding 10 years, and located the 10 articles from each year with the highest impact as measured by Total Cites from Thomson’s ISI Web of Knowledge. Of the 881 top-ranked articles, fully 35.2% pertained to a group-level topic (which they defined, fairly conservatively, as pertaining to intergroup relations; intergroup relations, social identity, stereotyping, stereotype threat, social influence, entitativity, group performance, group decision making or productivity, social dilemmas, leadership, structure or ecology of groups, power in groups, and conflict in groups). Although Randsley de Moura, Leader, Pelletier, and Abrams live on the same planet as Wittenbaum and Moreland, they conclude “The progress of group processes and intergroup relations based research is steady and sure, both in terms of quantity and impact” (p. 591).

A final reason for the pronounced differences in opinions regarding the state of the field of group dynamics is the interdisciplinary interest in groups. No one discipline holds the exclusive rights to the study of groups. Scientists in such fields as anthropology, communication studies, education, engineering, fields devoted to mental health, political science, sociology, sports and recreation, the legal profession, and, of course, business, all study groups. When the work of scientists in these fields is recognized, then the actual level of interest in group-level processes can be more full appreciated (Hackman & Katz, 2010; Sanna & Parks, 1997). Consider, for example, the study of teams–which, by the way, are groups. A search of the phrase social cognition yields a healthy 226,000 hits in Google Scholar. Search for the word team, in contrast, generates 3,730,000.

In conclusion, it is not clear that the study of groups is, or even ever was, moribund. The exact opposite may, in fact, be the case. Even though Ross and his colleagues offer up a bleak assessment of the study of groups, they do not mention the findings reported by F. D. Richard, Charles Bond, and Juli Stokes-Zoota in their 2003 meta-analysis of meta-analyses in social psychology. When they examined 100s of prior meta-analytic studies of various social psychological processes, they discovered that the average effect size in those studies was .21, a low to moderately strong effect. But, when they looked more closely across topics, they discovered that some relationships were particularly paltry, whereas others were more robust. Studies of the relationship between personality and behavior, for example, are often considered relatively unsubstantial by social psychologists, but as personality psychologists have maintained all along they were consistently stronger (r = .22) than the relationships documented in studies of influence (r = .12), attribution (r = .14), and expectancies (r = .16). And what one area of study has yielded the strongest support for predicted relationships between the variables specified in its theories? Leading the way, across all 18 topics identified by Richard and his colleagues: The scientific study of groups and their dynamics, with mean r of .32.

References

Abrams, D., & Hogg, M. A. (1998). Prospects for research in group processes and intergroup relations. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 1(1), 7-20.

Festinger, L. (1955). Social psychology and group processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 6, 187-216.

Hackman, J. R., & Katz, N. (2010). Group behavior and performance. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, 5th ed., pp. 1208-1251). Wiley: Hoboken, New Jersey.

Harrington, B., & Fine, G. A. (2000). Opening the “black box”: Small groups and twenty-first-century sociology. Social Psychology Quarterly, 63(4), 312-323.

Levine, J. M., & Moreland, R. L. (1998). Small groups. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, 4th ed., pp.415-469). McGraw-Hill: New York.

Randsley de Moura, G., Leader, T., Pelletier, J., & Abrams, D. (2008). Prospects for group processes and intergroup relations research: A review of 70 years’ progress. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 11, 575-596.

Richard, F. D., Bond Jr., C. F., & Stokes-Zoota, J. (2003). One hundred years of social psychology quantitatively described. Review of General Psychology, 7(4), 331-363.

Ross, L., Lepper, M., & Ward, A. (2010). History of social psychology: Insights, challenges, and contributions to theory and application. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 1, 5th ed., pp. 3-50). Wiley: Hoboken, New Jersey.

Sanna, L. J., & Parks, C. D. (1997). Group research trends in social and organizational psychology: Whatever happened to intragroup research? Psychological Science, 8(4), 261-267.

Sims, C. (Interviewer). (2007). The coalition builder: Antonio Villaraigosa (Chap. 2: Gang capital of America).  New York Times, http://video.nytimes.com/video/2007/03/30/multimedia/1194817121411/gang-capital-of-america.html

Steiner, I. D. (1974). Whatever happened to the group in social psychology? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 10(1), 94-108.

Williams, K. D. (2010). Dyads can be groups (and often are). Small Group Research, 41(2), 268-274.

Wittenbaum, G. M., & Moreland, R. L. (2008). Small-group research in social psychology: Topics and trends over time. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(1), 187-203.

This essay also appeared in Dialogue, 2012.

Reviews of previous work generally come in two flavors: narrative and quantitative. When writing a narrative review, the researcher examines previous research carefully and draws general conclusions about the strength of the relationships among the variables that have been investigated. When writing a meta-analytic review, in contrast, the researcher combines the results of previous research statistically to determine, quantitatively, the strength of the relationships under study. Although the size of the samples and the number of studies analyzed influence these estimates of relationship, those that fall between .1 and .2 are considered small, from .2 to .5 moderate, and those above .5 large.

When Richard, Bond, and Stokes-Zoota (2003) examined 100s of prior meta-analytic studies of various social psychological processes, they discovered that the average effect size in those studies was .21, a low to moderately strong effect. But, when they looked more closely across topics, they discovered that some relationships were particularly paltry, whereas others were more robust. Studies the relationship between personality and behavior, for example, are often considered relatively unsubstantial by social psychologists, yet they were consistently stronger (r = .22) than the relationships documented in studies of influence (r = .12), attribution (r = .14), and expectancies (r = .16). And what one area of study had yielded the strongest support for predicted relationships between the variables specified in its theories? Leading the way, across all 18 topics identified by Richard, Bond, and Stokes-Zoota (2003), was the scientific study of groups and their dynamics, with mean r of .32.

Even the most important word in the field of group dynamics–group–is difficult to define: at least, the field has yet to reach consensus on THE definition to use to define what is and what is not a group.

One particularly intriguing sub-argument within this definitional discussion is the debate about size, and the status of the two-person group–the dyad–within the concept of “group.” Whereas some, such as Moreland and Levine (2012) do not consider dyads to be groups, others (e.g., Forsyth, 2010, Williams, 2010) assume two people can be considered to be a group–albeit, a very small one.

Moreland and Levine point to a number of reasons why dyads do not belong in the larger category of group.

1. Dyads seem to be more ephemeral than larger groups. That is, they both form and dissolve more quickly.

2. Dyads are much more emotionally involving than larger groups. Certain phenomena that are important in dyads (e.g., love, sex, jealousy) are rarer in large groups, if they occur at all.

3. Some phenomena that occur in larger groups cannot occur in dyads, because dyads are too small. These phenomena include group socialization, majority/minority relations, and coalition formation.

4. Even when a phenomenon occurs in both dyads and larger groups, it may operate quite differently in each, and so it is mistaken to draw conclusions about one by studying the other.

Williams (2010) disagrees, and offers a number of reasons why dyads are best considered to be groups, but his core justification is that some of the most fascinating of group processes–social facilitation, inclusion/exclusion, and social loafing–occur in both dyads and groups. Yes: (Williams, 2010, p. 273):

dyads are special groups that show greater or lesser processes than their larger sized counterparts. And yes, sometimes group phenomena are unlikely or impossible in dyads. But by excluding dyads from our consideration of group research, we neglect a great deal of research that informs group processes and dynamics and, just as important, we undersell our vibrancy and impact on the field.

As William’s position implies, what matters most is the use of scientific methods to reliable, law-like generalizations about the behavior of individuals when with others. If the processes that occur in dyads are so unique that they require researchers develop theories specific to dyads, and test them only in dyads, then the “we don’t need no stinkin’ dyads” position (Moreland, 2010, p. 264) is reasonable. However, if basic laws of group processes apply to groups that range in size from 2 to many, and if these theories’ assumptions can be tested in groups that similarly range in size, then dyads are appropriate targets of investigation. Williams, who studies the impact of exclusion on interpersonal relations, also notes that rejecting dyads from the group family seems oddly exclusionary: if dyads aren’t groups, and they aren’t individuals, then who will study them? Is an entire field of dyadism needed?

Granovetter, in his classic 1973 analysis “The Strength of Weak Ties,” identifies a number of factors that influence the nature of these ties between group members: duration, emotional intensity, intimacy, and exchange, as well as directedness (reciprocal or one-directional) and valence (positive or negative). These factors generally combine to influence the overall strength of the relationship, where strong relationships are ones that generate (a) enduring, repeated, frequent interactions, (b) strong feelings of attachment and emotional contagion, (c) the exchange of personal information in copious quantities, and (d) interdependency. But, he cleverly notes that weak ties–once that typify the links between people who would describe themselves as “acquaintances” rather than “friends,” also substantially influence group dynamics.

First, weak ties are sources of new information. When individuals are linked through strong ties, they share the same experiences and alliances, and so their knowledge base is shared. If one individual is removed from such a tight-knit group, the impact is relatively negligible, in terms of information, because their knowledge was shared rather than unique. Weak ties, in contrast, connect individuals who hardly know each other, and also have less in common. In consequence, they provide more varied types of information, which Granovetter illustrates with example of job search. He discovered that many people who are seeking employment learn of positions not from their close friends, but from acquaintances. Their close friends can only tell them about jobs they are already aware of, whereas acquaintances know about jobs they had not discovered on their own.

Second, weak ties join groups together. Individuals are members of many different groups, which are joined together by weak rather than strong ties. For example, A, B, C, and D may be all very good friends, but A may also be acquainted with X–who is good friends with Y and Z. The weak tie between A and X links together the two groups of A-D and X-Z.

Barabasi, in his book Linked, provides some backstory to Granovetter’s publication. Granovetter, it seems, submitted his strength-in-weak-ties for publication while he was still a graduate student at Harvard. Granovetter had developed the idea after listening to a lecture by Harrison White, who did early work on social networks. Inspired, Granovetter carried out a field work in Newton, Massachusetts, where he discovered that most people seeking jobs learned about positions from acquaintances rather than friends. But when he sent the paper to American Sociological Review for review and possible publication in August of 1969, he got less than favorable evaluations: one reviewer said it should not be published for an “endless series of reasons” (Barabasi, 2003, p. 42). Granovetter, after recovering from the sting of rejection, recouped and rewrote, and submitted a revised paper to the American Journal of Sociology–where it was published in 1973. Google indicates this paper has been cited 19,134 times!