Zajonc's Drive Theory

Zajonc (1965) imposed order on his findings by arguing that the mere presence of others is a source of General Arousal. This arousal increases the likelihood that dominant responses will be emitted, which in turn facilitates performance on tasks that require familiar responses and impairs performance on tasks that require novel responses. Evidence that audiences hinder performance when new responses must be learned but help performance after these responses have been acquired (e.g. Hunt & Hillery 1973) is consistent with Zajonc's position. According to Zajonc's view, the presence of others is likely to elicit accessible cognitions (e.g. Common word associations to verbal stimuli), which in turn facilitate performance when these cognitions are correct for the task at hand and impair performance when they are incorrect.

Hunt & Hillery theory

Consistent with
Audiences hinder performance when new responses must be learned but help performance after these responses have been acquired (Hunt & Hillery 1973) is consistent with Zajonc's position. According to Zajonc's view, the presence of others is likely to elicit accessible cognitions (e.g. Common word associations to verbal stimuli), which in turn facilitate performance when these cognitions are correct for the task at hand and impair performance when they are incorrect.

Social Facilitation
Two of the earliest experiments in social psychology (Triplett 1898; Meumann 1904, cited by Cottrell 1972) demonstrated that the presence of either co-actors or a passive audience can enhance performance. These socialfacilitation effects elicited a good deal of research attention, but by the early 1960s a confusing picture had emerged. Some studies confirmed that the mere presence of others enhanced performance; others found that passive audiences and co-actors impeded performance.

Theory

Another Explanation

Duval & Wicklund View

Presence of an audience causes people to focus attention on the self (Duval & Wicklund 1972; Wicklund 1975). This in turn leads to thoughts about discrepancies between the actual self and the ideal self. Such "objective self-awareness" can be thought of as a form of "metacognition" (Brown et al 1983).

Metacognition
Is a form of
Theories typically stress the enhancing effects of being aware of one's cognitive processes, objective self-awareness can either enhance or depress task performance, depending on how it affects motivation and attention.

Weldon & Gargano's study

Example
Subjects who performed a multi-attribute judgment task were led to believe that: (a) They either did or did not share responsibility for their performance (i.e. their output would or would not be combined with that of several others) and (b) They either were or were not accountable for their individual performance (i.e. The experimenter would or would not contact them to learn more about their evaluations).

Result 1

Social Loafing Solution

Loafing can be reduced or eliminated by increasing the identifiability and uniqueness of members' task contributions. In the ease when those contributions and members' accountability are evaluated, social loafing will also be reduced.

Weldon & Gargano's Results

Results
Mathematical models of subjects' judgments indicated that subjects in the shared responsibility/ no-accountability condition slack off in a group (even when working alone). . However, this social loafing was reduced when subjects in the shared-responsibility condition felt accountable for their performance.

Social Loafing
Decreased effort in pseudogroups is called social loafing. it is proven to be a robust phenomenon, occurring on cognitive tasks, such as evaluating written materials and brainstorming as well as physical tasks. People slack off in a group (even when working alone). Effect is decreased when contributions are (or will be) identified.

Solution

Coordination Loss
People working together did not perform as well as expected on the basis of their individual performances. One explanation for this reduced performance is "coordination loss" due to group members' interfering with one another's responses.

Cause

Mere Presence of Others

Result 2
Even if there is no interaction with others who are (believed to be) present, cognitive performance is affected. Example study: type name backwards with/without another person in the room who is wearing a blindfold and earphones.

Solution Occurs in

Pseudogroup
Coordination loss as an explanation of reduced group performance has been eliminated by having members work alone but leading them to believe that others were simultaneously working on the same task and that the outputs of all members would be combined. Results indicated that, in this "pseudogroup" situation, individuals expended less effort when they thought they were working in a group than when they thought they were working alone. This decreased effort, labeled "social loafing".

Result 3

Crowding
Result 4
Here, the issue is not simply that other people are physically present or even that large numbers of others are present. Instead, crowding involves the subjective sense that "too many" people are occupying a given physical space (Stokols 1972). The perception of crowding is itself socially determined, as indicated by cultural differences in how people perceive and use space (Hall 1966).

Crowding Properties
Properties Effects
Crowded situations have several aversive properties, including uncertainty, loss of control, cognitive overload, and behavioral constraints (Paulus & Nagar 1989).

Paulus et al Findings
Paulus et. al. (1976) found that various ways of producing crowding led to performance decrements on a multiple-level maze task. In addition, crowding may elicit particular types of thoughts and judgments, including perceptions of helplessness, attributions about the behaviors of others, and ideas about how to cope with or escape from the unpleasant situation, which may be distracting and thereby inhibit cognitive performance.

Crowding Effects
Crowding impairs performance, particularly on complex tasks (Baum & Paulus 1987).

Example

Group Composition Effects

Effects
Group composition can affect several types of social information processing, including stereotyperelated memory and judgment, social projection, and the perception that the in group is more heterogeneous than the out group.

Group Composition
The mix of people who belong to a group. Token or minority members are more likely to be distracted from task.

Example

Group Composition Example

Compared to majority members of groups, "token" and minority members (e.g. women in predominantly male groups) attract more attention from others, and are more aware of the characteristics that distinguish them from others. This visibility, in turn, can distract token members from their task and thereby interfere with their performance (Lord & Saenz 1985).

Factor 1

Anderson & Picherts Finding Social Roles

Role expectations are comprised of the rights and privileges, the duties and obligations, of any occupant of a social position in relation to persons occupying. Role enactment impacts cognition.

Example 1

Anderson & Pichert (1978) found that subjects' assignment to the role of home buyer versus burglar influenced their memory for the properties of a house that they read about.

Example 2

Zukier & Pepitones Finding

Zukier & Pepitone (1984) found that assignment to the role of scientist versus clinical counselor influenced subjects' use of base rate information in evaluating a target person.

Social Position Examples

Roles
Professor Second-year Student Muslim Midwestern

Social roles, position & identities

Cognitive activity is strongly affected by how people construe the social situation in which they find themselves. Several lines of research in developmental, educational, and cultural psychology suggest that people whose abilities are assessed in particular situations (e.g. Laboratory interviews, standardized tests) often do not demonstrate their full capacities. This may occur because a person's beliefs about how he or she ought to behave in the situation do not match the expectations of the assessor. People's perceptions of others expectations affect their own cognitions and behaviors.

Social Positions
Social positions are defined as socially recognized categories of actors are more long-lived and socially defined. When a positional category is assigned to a person, the individual is expected to possess particular attributes and is responded to on the assumption that he or she has these attributes.

Example

Social Positions 1
Type 1 Type 2
Some social positions are social roles, which involve normative expectations regarding appropriate behavior and sanctions for violating these expectations.

Positions

Social Positions 2
Other social positions simply involve probabilistic expectancies about how a person will" (as opposed to "should") behave.

Levine, Resnick: Mere Social factors that influence Cognition

1- Mere presence of others, 2- Social roles, position, and identities, 3- Mental representations of others, 4- Social interaction and cognitive change, 5- Cognition as collaboration.

Factor 2

Effects

Assigning a person to a social position

Others have certain cognitions about the person. Being treated as though one had a positionrelated characteristic causes the person to have certain cognitions about himself or herself. Performance affected by others assumptions.

Positions

Social Roles Social Identities

Social roles do not always become social identities. A person can enact a particular role but not identify with it (e.g. because role performance is forced by external pressure), and a person can identify with a social position (e.g. being short) that does not involve any role responsibilities.

Relation with Social Role

Charters & Newcomb Study

He managed to increase the salience of Catholic students religious identity by emphasizing the common religious identification of everyone in the room and found that this identity activation caused students' opinions to shift toward orthodox Catholic beliefs.

Social Identities
People who are assigned to social positions by others sometimes internalize these positional designations and come to view themselves as the others view them. So it is internalized roles/ positions.

Case study 1

Case study 2

Frable et. al. Study

He found that individuals who have social identities that are statistically rare and socially important (e.g. bisexual, wealthy) are more "mindful" during a dyadic interaction than are their normal partners, recalling more detailed information and taking their partners perspective.

Effect Factor 3

Impact of Social Identity

Socially categorizing another person as an ingroup versus an outgroup member can substantially affect how this person is perceived and treated, therefore through repeated interactions; you come to see yourself as others see you.

Role-Taking
The ability to take the roles of others is critical to effective role enactment. Situational roletaking involves "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" and inferring how you would respond if you were in the other person's situation. Individual role-taking involves "seeing the world through someone else's eyes" and inferring how the other person would respond if he or she were in the same situation as you.

Impact of Age in RoleTaking

Impact of Age
Role-taking ability shows systematic developmental shifts with age. As People mature, children become more adept at shifting perspective when asked to process identical input from different viewpoints; older (but not younger) children can represent events differently as a function of the perspective they are asked to adopt.

Reference Faculty Members

Example
Students' evaluations of their own research ideas can be influenced by evoked representations of approving or disapproving faculty members.

Case 1

Reference Groups and Individuals

Individuals opinions are often influenced by the assumed opinions of groups or even reference individuals who are not present. People are motivated to meet the standards of some (positive) reference groups and to violate those of other (negative) reference groups they deem important.

Factor 4

Mental representations of others

An individual who is not in the physical presence of others has knowledge about their responses or expects to learn about these responses in the future. These mental representations of others can have important effects on the individuals cognitions.

Case 2

Clarifying

Reference Groups can be ...

A reference group may or may not be a membership group - people are sometimes formal members of groups with which they identify and sometimes not. E.g. Future employers, Facebook friends, professors.

Case 3

Social Cognitive Processes Social Comparison

People actively select comparison targets and construct and distort comparison information to serve their goals. Thus, people sometimes imagine comparison targets who do not exist (e.g. Hypothetical others who are worse off than they are) and select comparison dimensions that are likely to satisfy their goals (e.g. Dimensions on which they are likely to be superior to others).

Case 4

Peoples self-perceptions and evaluations are influenced by comparing themselves to others, even when no evaluation by these others is expected. Others characteristics and performances are obtained in two ways: 1- Direct observation, 2- Third-parties (e.g. newspaper writers, mutual acquaintances)

Contemporary Researches

Consequences

Consequences of Social Comparison

Receiving information indicating that one is superior or inferior to others has some consequences, including changes in outcome expectations and self-efficacy as well as in achievement striving.

Anticipated Interactions with Others

Factor 5
When people expect to interact with others, they often prepare by engaging in various kinds of anticipatory cognitive activity. This anticipatory activity is likely to differ as a function of the kind of interaction that is expected and the presumed nature of the interaction partners. Mental preparation differs according to expected interactions.

Zajonc Work on Cognitive Tuning

Expecting to present one's position to others and/or expecting to learn about their position can affect cognitive activity. Persons who expect to transmit information have more organized and polarized cognitive structures than do those who expect to receive information.

Consequences

Anticipatory Cognitive Activity

Person may know nothing about the interaction partner's position or believe that the partner agrees or disagrees with his or her position. These factors are likely to affect both the amount and type of anticipatory cognitive activity that occurs.

Example 1

Example 2

Bargh & Schul and Benware & Deci

Individuals learn material better when they expect to teach it to others than when they do not have this expectation.

Disagreement
Interpersonal disagreement can facilitate intellectual development in children. Interpersonal conflict is an important facilitator of cognitive change; such conflict need not involve face-to-face interaction in order to be effective

Example

Hearing Counter Attitudinal Opinion

Reading or hearing a counter attitudinal messagewatching Fox News if youre a liberal (in the absence of any face-to-face interaction with the communicator) can influence the quantity and quality of individuals' cognitive activity.

Example 3

Devine et. al.

Anticipated interaction can influence information processing about the people with whom one will interact. Expecting to interact with a target person, compared with not expecting to do so, produces better recall of information about the person, more individuation of the person in memory, and more accurate name-to-item associations for the person.

Socio-cognitive Conflict
Social interaction can produce intellectual development if socio-cognitive conflict is generated and resolved. And it occurs when individuals have different responses to the same problem and are motivated to achieve a joint solution. The intellectual development produced by sociocognitive conflict reflects extensive cognitive restructuring rather than mere imitation, as indicated by subjects' ability to generalize responses from one domain to another, to employ novel arguments that were not mentioned during interaction, and to profit from interaction with peers at the same or lower levels of cognitive development. Impact of conflict resolution on intellectual progress is influenced by some factors.

Conflict Resolution Intellectual Progress

Influential Factors on intellectual progress
- Intensity and social significance of the conflict. - Whether the conflict is resolved through compliance by one of the participants. -Interactants levels of cognitive development - Interactants' social origin and status - Perceived social position of others

Type 1

Type 2

Majority Influence
Majority influence is conformity by clarifying the circumstances under which people who hold a minority position in a group adopt the position held by the majority.

Minority Influence: Moscovicis Opinion

Study 1
Minorities trigger a "validation" process involving attention to the minority's position and cognitive activity about this position.

Social Interaction and Cognitive Change

Social interactions stimulate mental effort and promote cognitive change. Cognitive challenges from others can produce elaborations in individual thinking.

Type 3

Majority and Minority Influence

The simulative effect of interpersonal disagreement on individual mental activity can be seen in research on majority and minority influence. Interpersonal disagreement affects cognitive processes, including attention, convergent and divergent thought, and memory. Exposure to disagreement from other (particularly minorities) produces cognitive changes.

Type 1 Type 2

Minority Influence
Minority influence is innovation by clarifying the conditions under which people holding a majority position adopt the minority position.

Study 2

Minority Influence: Nemeths opinion

Minorities stimulate issue-relevant, divergent thinking, which in turn leads to creative responses. minority can sometimes stimulate more "advanced" cognitive responses than those exhibited in its own behavior.

Effect

Compliance / Conversion: Moscovicis Opinion Conformity and Innovation

Study
An important question regarding both conformity and innovation is whether the position change resulting from disagreement represents public agreement (compliance) or private agreement (conversion). Minorities have their primary impact on conversion, whereas majorities have their primary impact on compliance.

Type 4

Conversion Definition

Conversion
Conversion is private movement toward the influence source's position (e.g. agreement with other group members even though they cannot see one's responses). In addition, conversion is sometimes defined as delayed change, which occurs after the influence source is no longer present, and as indirect change, which occurs on related issues that were not mentioned by the source.

Sande & Zannas Opinion

Private opinion change in the direction of the group's final position. It is generally assumed that such change is more likely if the person is yielding to "informational" rather than "normative" pressure. Changes in members' (private) certainty levels were primarily attributable to informational influence, whereas changes in their (public) verdict preferences were due to normative as well as informational influence.

Group Decision Making

Direct pressure from a group influences decision making. Although the goal of group decision making is to arrive at a consensual judgment superior to the judgments of individual members, participation in this collective activity can have important cognitive consequences for group members.

Effect on Individuals Theory 1

Effect on Individuals Theory 2

Laughlin et. al.s Opinion

Engaging in group decision making can lead individuals to adopt the problem-solving strategies that the group used. He demonstrated specific group-to-individual transfer on the same type of problem that the group worked on.

Group Think
It is defined as extreme concurrence-seeking that produces poor group decisions. Janis (1982) argued that factors such as external threat, high group cohesiveness, and directive leadership produce symptoms of groupthink.

Can Lead to

Shared Cognitions
Coordinated cognitive activity depends upon intersubjectivity. Shared knowledge, norms, motivation: can increase performance, but can also lead to group think.

Intersubjectivity
It is shared understanding of what is being discussed or worked on. Although it is an intuitively appealing concept, is difficult to operationalize and its presence is typically inferred from successful coordination of activity by dyad or group members, rather than from direct measurement.

Depends Upon

Depends Upon Result 1

Sherifs research
He suggests norms are formed in groups. He investigated how people come to share common perceptions of an ambiguous perceptual stimulus, namely the apparent movement of a stationary point of light in an otherwise dark room (the autokinetic effect). The judgments of individual group members converged until a shared estimate of the light's direction and distance of movement was attained, and this socially developed norm continued to influence members judgments when they later responded alone.

Effect of new comers

- Norm is often maintained over several "generations" also when new members join. - When newcomers are involved group's efforts to transmit its norms are particularly strong. - Groups are highly motivated to provide newcomers with the knowledge, ability, and motivation they will need to play the role of full member. - Newcomers are typically receptive to these influence attempts because they feel a strong need to learn what is expected of them.

Cognition as collaboration
Many important cognitive tasks are performed by groups. At work and in civic and personal life, each person's ability to function successfully depends upon coordinated cognitive interactions with others, and the cognitive "products" that emerge from these interactions cannot be attributed to single individuals.

Research Results

Result 2

Pros & Cons of Transaction Memory Transactive Memory Group Memory

Includes
It is a shared system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information. This system, which develops when people interact over time, is composed of the memory systems of the individuals in the relationship and the communication processes that link these systems.

Effects

Result 3

It improves information encoding, storage, and retrieval, but under certain conditions, it can have detrimental effects.

Distributing roles, knowledge, information with good transactions among members improves performance.

Example

Pros & Cons of Transaction Memory

Romantic partners exhibited lower recall than did pairs of strangers when the experimenter imposed a particular memory structure (e.g. One person should remember food items, and the other should remember history items), whereas just the opposite pattern emerged when no memory structure was assigned.

Interaction

Communication and Linguistic Interaction

Based on
According to Common ground, there are better and worse ways for knowledge transactions to occur.

Common ground
= Coordinating referential meaning. Grounding activities are determined by the principle of "least collaborative effort".

Effective Factors

Common ground Effective Factors

Grounding activities change with both: 1- the purpose of the conversation (e.g. Identify referents vs. register verbatim content), and 2- the medium of the conversation (e.g. face-toface vs. electronic mail).

Group Interaction
We might expect groups to perform better than individuals on various tasks, including learning and concept attainment, creativity, and problem solving. However, this often is not the case relative performance of individuals and groups depends heavily on the task.

Group vs. Individual Judgment

Example
On numerical estimation tasks, group judgment is slightly superior to the average individual judgment. On other tasks (e.g. Logical and mathematical brainteaser problems), group judgment is better than the average individual judgment and worse than the best individual judgment, except on "Eureka" problems, where group performance tends to equal that of the most competent member.