GROUPS AND COMMUNICATION

Presentation By

Tasaddaq H. Qureshi MS.Media Studies IIUI.Pakistan

tasaddaqqureshi@yahoo.com

What is a Group ?

A combination of two or more people is called a group.

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3 Most Important Groups

1. 2. 3.

Primary Group Reference Group Casual Group

1- Primary Group

It

is a group involving longstanding, intimate, face-to-face association. For example: A family, a work group a team ,a fraternity, and a military unit.
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2- Reference Group
It

is identified with and used as a standard of reference but not necessarily belong to. For example: A student wishing to belong to a certain fraternity might begin to dress like members and adopt their attitudes even though he is not a member.

3- Casual Group
It

is one-time group of people who did not know each other before they were brought together. For example, People riding in an elevator, people riding a bus, or strangers sitting together at a football match.
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Sharefs Research on
Group Norms
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NORMS Certain rules or standards, For example:

1 . Hair style, 2 . Skirt length, 3 . Taste in popular music 4 . Style of greeting and 5 . Form of handshake. which are often shared by different groups , are called norms.

Process of the formation of norms

Muzafer

Sharif (1936,1937) Conducted a laboratory research around a phenomenon known as the auto kinetic light effect.

SHERIFS EXPERIMENT

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Observations
Stage1:several persons were examined one by one. Their estimates were ranging from 1.5 inch to 2 feet. Stage2:All those were put together in the room. The group adopted a norm of its own, which was somewhere around the average. Stage3: Again they were examined one by one. All of them stayed with the norm that they had formed in the group.

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SHERIFS CONCLUSION
1.

In a situation of uncertainty, people are dependent on other people for guidance. 2. It also shows the influence of the group can extend to situations in which the group is not present. 3. On the basis of Sherifs work, we might expect to find that groups have a great deal of influence on attitudes in these and other ambiguous areas.
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ASCH

RESEARCH ON

GROUPP RESSURE
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Effect of group pressure

Asch (1955,1956) Conducted a laboratory research. He studied, what happens when group pressure is introduced into a situation.
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ASCHS EXPERIMENT
1 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

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Instrument

1: The Red card has one line. 2: Each Blue card has three lines (123). 3:One line in both cards ( R + B ) is equal in length.
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Data Collected (one by one)

Q: Which line of Blue Cards ( 1 2 3 ) is equal in

length , to the line of the Red Card ? Sets of Cards 0 Error 1 Error 2 Error Total

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Data Collected (in group)

Q: Which line of Blue Cards ( 123 ) is equal

in length , to the line of the Red Card ?

In a group of 8 subjects,1 was true and 7

were instructed by experimenter to give wrong answers.
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Data Collected (in group)

Error Rate No. Of Subjects % Of Subjects

0
1-7 8-12

29 59 35 123

24 49 27 100

Error rate on 12 trials for 123 subjects Asch Experiment.

A. 76 % of Subjects gave wrong answer at least once.

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B. 36.8 % of the answers were wrong due to group pressure.

CONCLUSIONS
Aschs

research gave a striking demonstration that some people will go along with the group even when it means contradicting information derived from their own senses.
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SHERIF& ASCHS COMMON ASSESMENT

1. Sherfs research dealt with groups in a situation with high ambiguity. 2. Asch investigated similar forces at work in a situation with little ambiguity.
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SHERIF& ASCHS COMMON ASSESMENT

3. Sherif & Aschs experiments show that even casual groups, people who had never seen each other before, exert a strong influence.

It seems likely that the power of groups would

be even greater when we are dealing with primary groups such as families or work groups.
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KURT LEWINS

FOOD HABITS

STUDIES
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Groups
and

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Political Attitudes

Introduction

Paul Lazarsfeld et. al, of Columbia University, carried out some of the first careful studies of how people decide whom to vote for in an election? in 1940s. In 1940 and 1948,two presidential elections were studied. Both studies were sample surveys of the panel type. Same respondents were interviewed several times.

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Conclusion
1.

2.

3.

Mass Media played a weak role in election decisions compared with personal influence, or the influence of other people. These studies showed a strong tendency for people to vote the same way the members of their primary groups voted. The findings were strikingly parallel to the Asch research on group pressure, which showed that a unanimous majority of three was sufficient to influence many peoples judgments.

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Explanation
This homogeneity of opinion in the political area could be explained by two different processes. 1: Group exerts pressure on and influences individuals judgment, just as it did in Asch experiments. 2: The people might select friends whose political attitudes agree with their own. They have a great deal of choice in selecting their friends, where as they have less choice in selecting their coworkers, and often no choice in selecting their families.

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 3:

Knowledge of just two factors..religion and socio-economic status. Makes a persons vote predictable with a fairly high degree of accuracy. 4: using several more factorssay five or six..makes a persons vote even more predictable.
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SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION MODEL

OF GROUP INFLUENCE
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This model proposes that a Social

Group be defined as two or more individuals who share a common social identification or perceive themselves to be members of the same social category (Turner,1982).
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The social identification model alerts our thinking about groups in some significant ways :

FIRST. It suggests that an important kind of group membership is based on cognitive responses (who am i ?) rather than emotional responses (do I like these people?).
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SECOND: It suggests that the social categories that people assign to themselves are not just weak association but are an important kind of group membership in themselves. THIRD: It suggests that this process of identification with social categories might have important consequences. Individuals take these category memberships seriously because they are related to their concept of who they are.

FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION

Vincent Price,1988, suggests that social identification model is useful for helping us understand the formation of public opinion and the role of mass media play in that process. He argues that the mass media play an important role in bringing social identification processes to bear on the formation of public opinion.
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FIRST: The mass media depict which groups are at odds over a particular issue, therefore signaling which group identities are relevant to that issue. SECOND: by depicting how the groups are responding the issue, the media can indicate the opinions that are being held by each group and thus the norms should be followed by people identifying with that group.

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THIRD: the opinion norms of the group are likely to become perceptually exaggerated in the minds of audience members. FOURTH: people impute their groups perceived opinion norm to themselves and become more likely to express this exaggerated norm. It is at this point that public opinion on various issues might appear to solidify or crystallize.

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Groups as Instruments of Change

The

groups have the power of social influence. Sometimes ,groups can be used as an agents or instruments of change. The principles of group norms and group pressure can often be seen at work in organizations such as Alcoholic Anonymity , Weight Watchers and some groups that help people to stop smoking.
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Bill W. one of the founders of AA, (1967) writes in The A.A. Way of Life : The most individuals cannot recover unless there is a group.One learns that the clamor of desires and ambitions within him must be silenced whenever these could damage the group.
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It becomes plain that the group must survive or the individual will not.(p.9) Group dynamics can also be applied to fund drives. A kind of social influence within the primary group of the family appears to have been taking place lately in the revival of the ecology movement. Youngsters have been learning through media, about threats to the environment ,and have been exerting pressure on their parents to act in more ecologically sound ways.

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Groups & Mass Communication

Rogers

& Storey (1987) : Interpersonal communication through peer (hamkhial) networks is very important in leading to and behavior change.

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Health Research

Researchers working in the field of health communication have found an approach based on group influence to be an effective one. A Campaign, intended to change peoples habits relating to the three leading risk factors in heart diseases-diet, smoking, and lake of exercise.
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3 - Towns of California
The researchers selected three similar towns of California. First was given an eight-month media campaign (involving local TV, and radio spots, a newspaper tabloid, billboards and direct mail). Second was given the same media campaign but selected group of high-risk people were also given intensive group instruction in reducing risks. Third town served as a control group and received no campaign or instruction.

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Results
1. Media Only Town: Cholesterol level was one percent down. 2. Media-Plus-Group-instruction Town: Cholesterol level was five percent down. 3.No Campaign Receiving Town: Cholesterol level was two percent up.

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CONCLUSIONS

1.Groups serve to anchor attitudes and make them hard to change (Cooper and Jahoda) 2.Knowledge of the groups that a person belongs to or identifies with, can often help us to predict the persons behavior.
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CONCLUSIONS
3. Effective programs of communication often involve a combination of mass communication and interpersonal communication. 4. Sometimes ways can be found to obtain some of the advantages of interpersonal communication through mass communication, e.g. answer to a phone call in a TV talk show or press conference.

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The End
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