Need help with my Psychology question – I’m studying for my class.
SUBJECT 1
Part 1: We’ve all worked in groups before and a lot of what you read in Chapter 11 probably rang true of your experience in them. Pull out four terms from Chapter 11 and apply them (with some explanation) to your experience in a group. This can be your experience of one group or different experiences in different groups.
Interdependence is how much group members are reliant on each other to complete a task. At work we a broken up into groups and we are highly interdependent. Some of the people who have been at the office for longer have different qualifications. Without them, it would be impossible to complete any of our work projects.
Social facilitation is when a person performs better in the presence of other people. I played several musical instruments in high school and performed in several different ensembles, but the thought of performing a solo basically debilitated me. In these situations, being in a group was the best way for me to perform.
A divisible task is a task that can be divided in order to be completed. This makes me think of every school project ever. Powerpoint projects often divided by each person creating a different slide on a different subset of the overarching topic.
Social loafing, when someone does not work as hard as they would if they were working alone, is another term that reminds me of school projects. It always seems that one or two people end up working harder than the rest. Ultimately, everyone gets the same grade, so some people choose to not work as hard as they would alone because they know there is someone else in the group who will pick up the slack.
Also, answer the following (Saylor Foundation, n.d.): Consider groups that provide a particularly strong social identity for their members. Why do you think social identity is so strong in these groups, and how does the experience of identity influence the group members’ behavior?
I am choosing to answer this in relation to people who are grouped based on the sports team or athlete they support. When the team is doing good, there is a much stronger social identity among the members. In my opinion, they are proud of their team and may even feel that they had a role in helping the team get as far as they did. Because they are proud of an accomplishment of their group, they want to be seen and acknowledged of that accomplishment. This would increase their social identity. When a sports team loses, you may start to see less of a support behind the team. Maybe the fan chooses not to wear their jerseys or baseball caps. This shows a decrease in social identity.
Part 2: Please choose ONE of the following to answer (Saylor Foundation, n.d.):
- Review and critique the laboratory games that have been used to assess responses in social dilemmas. What are their strengths and the limitations?
The laboratory games that have been used are the prisoner dilemma games and the resources dilemma games. Both of these have the similar strengths and weaknesses. The first weakness, or limitation, is that they are set up in a lab setting. Prisoners in the real world could potentially act differently. Did they already make a pact as to if they were put up against each other, how long have they had a relationship, and what is the real world stress of having committed that crime done to their psyche? Take all of these factors and change the wording a little bit and the same thinking can be applied to the resources dilemma games. The strengths of these games is that they are the closest that will be reproduced to real world situations. There may be instances where the prisoner dilemma would be witnessed in real life, and we may study it after the situation is over, but science is not going to interfere with a criminal trial. As it refers to the resources dilemma games, I would see it as unethical to deprive a group of resources to see what happens when the resources are then reimplemented. You could probably do this with a part of the world that is already missing a specific resource, but it would be unfair to reintroduce something and then not be able to sustain resource production post-experiment.
SUBJECT 2
I had a group project in my PACE 111S class at UMGC with 4 group members including me. We had to complete a research team presentation on distractions and how to avoid them. All team members were supposed to contribute their ideas and collaborate to develop the team assignment. Our assignment was a divisible task since each member was assigned to work on their portion at the same time. One was assigned to summarize past research, one to edit for clarity, one to create the PowerPoint, and one to be the final reviewer. Through virtual brainstorming, our group members communicated to generate ideas for our assignment. At first, I was concerned about how we could complete our group project without meeting face to face since we lived in different parts of the country and were very diverse. However, during the group process our members had the same goal to get a good grade, so each member actively participated in our project. I think that we were more likely to share unique ideas because of this and we successfully completed our task better than we expected, achieving a process gain.
The Amish are a group of people with a strong social identity. The Amish’s follow a very traditional, conservative lifestyle, and their social identity differentiates them from the rest of secular society. Their social identity is very strong as their group norms and beliefs are specifically focused on preventing secular values from influencing group members and the community. The group’s social identity greatly impacts member behavior, as being Amish requires an unwavering rejection of any behaviors that are considered secular.
Part 2
Consider a time in which you were involved in a social dilemma. How did you respond to the problem?
The Army provides money to pay for housing, known as basic allowance for housing (BAH). We usually live in an apartment and have some extra remaining money even after paying utilities. However, at our recent station, we had to live on the base. On the base, the housing company takes all our BAH regardless of the amount of the utilities we use or the number of family members in the household. (In our case just two people). Our utility bill is usually a very small amount. Since we moved on the base, I did not want to save electricity or water, because regardless of how much I use, the company will take all our BAH money. I think this situation is similar to the harvesting dilemma. Since the utilities on the base are free, everyone is likely to overuse them without concern about the impact to the community later. Perhaps one day, future residents will have to pay overage charges because of how much utilities are being used now. Nevertheless, I still feel I should conserve energy for society, so I will likely limit my utility use anyways.
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