As the title suggests, cognitive psychology deals with psychological aspects of human cognition. Cognitive psychology research topics consider the psychological aspect behind language development and its use in different circumstance as well as to express different emotions through an interplay of essentially the same vocabulary, bringing articulation variables into the context The researchers asked the individuals to express their opinions about the guilt of the defendant both before and after the jury deliberated. As you can see in Figure , “Group Polarization, ” the opinions that the individuals held about the guilt or innocence of the defendants were found to be more extreme after discussion than they Dissertation. Exploring the meso-system: the relationship between unmet health care needs, access to medical home services, and parent-perceived autism severity by Pei Huang. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa. University of Iowa. Summer
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As well as achieving high levels of performance, another important task of groups is to make decisions. Indeed, we often entrust groups, rather than individuals, dissertation express individuals, with key decisions in our societies—for example, those made by juries and political parties.
An important question to ask here is whether we are right to trust groups more than individuals to reach sound decisions. Are many heads really better than one? It turns out that this question can be a hard one to answer, dissertation express individuals.
For one thing, studying decision making is hard, because it is difficult to assess the quality of a decision on the basis of what was known at the time, independently of its outcome. This is particularly challenging as w e naturally tend to look too much at the outcome when we evaluate decision makinga phenomenon known as the outcome bias. Nevertheless, with these caveats in mind, dissertation express individuals, it is possible to draw some tentative conclusions about when and why groups make better decisions than individuals, and also when and dissertation express individuals they may end up making worse ones.
Groups can make effective decisions only when they are able to make use of the advantages outlined above that come with group membership. However, these conditions are not always met in real groups. As we saw in the chapter opener, one example of a group process that can lead to very poor group decisions is groupthink. Groupthink occurs when a group that is made up of members who dissertation express individuals actually be very competent and thus quite capable of making excellent decisions nevertheless ends up making a poor one as a result of a flawed group process and strong conformity pressures Baron, ; Janis, Groupthink is more likely to occur in groups in which the members are feeling strong social identity—for instance, when there is a powerful and directive leader who creates a positive group feeling, and in times of stress and crisis when the group needs to rise to the occasion and make an important decision.
The problem is that groups suffering from dissertation express individuals become unwilling to seek out or discuss discrepant or unsettling information about the topic at hand, and the group members do not express contradictory opinions. Because the group members are afraid to express ideas that contradict those of the leader or to bring in outsiders who have other information, the group is prevented from making a fully informed decision.
Figure Although at least some scholars are skeptical of the importance of groupthink in real group decisions Kramer,many others have suggested that groupthink was involved in a number of well-known and important, but very poor, decisions made by government and business groups. Key historical decisions analyzed in terms of groupthink include the decision to invade Iraq made by President George Bush and his advisors, with the support of other national governments, including those from the United Kingdom, dissertation express individuals, Spain, Italy, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Australia; the decision of President John F, dissertation express individuals.
Kennedy and his advisors to commit U, dissertation express individuals. forces to help with an invasion of Cuba, with the goal of overthrowing Fidel Castro in ; and the policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany pursued by many European leaders in s, in the lead-up to World War II, dissertation express individuals. Intriguingly, groupthink has even been used to try to account for perceived anti-right-wing political biases of social psychologists Redding, Careful analyses of the decision-making process in the historical cases outlined above have documented the role of conformity pressures.
In fact, the group process often seems to be arranged dissertation express individuals maximize the amount of conformity rather than to foster free and open discussion.
In the meetings of the Bay of Pigs advisory committee, for instance, President Kennedy sometimes demanded that the group members give a voice vote regarding their individual opinions before the group actually discussed the pros and cons of a new idea.
The result of these conformity pressures is a general unwillingness to express ideas that do not match the group norm. The pressures for conformity also lead to the situation in which only a few of the group members are actually involved in conversation, whereas the others do not express any opinions.
Because little or no dissent is expressed in the group, the group members come to believe that they are in complete agreement. An outcome of the high levels of conformity found in these groups is that the group begins to see itself as extremely valuable and important, highly capable of making high-quality decisions, and invulnerable.
In short, the group members develop extremely high levels of conformity and social identity. Although this social identity may have some positive outcomes in terms of a commitment to work toward group goals and it certainly makes the group members feel good about themselvesit also tends to result in illusions of invulnerability, leading the group members to feel that they are superior and that they do not need to seek outside information.
Such a situation is often conducive to poor decision making, which can result in tragic consequences, dissertation express individuals. Interestingly, the composition of the group itself can affect the likelihood of groupthink occurring.
More diverse groups, for instance, can help to ensure that a wider range of views are available to the group in making their decision, which can reduce the risk of groupthink. Perhaps, then, mixed gender corporate boards are more successful partly because they are better able to avoid the dangerous phenomenon of groupthink.
One difficulty is that groups tend to discuss some types of information more than others, dissertation express individuals. In addition to the pressures to focus on information that comes from leaders and that is consistent with group norms, discussion is influenced by the way the relevant information is originally shared among the group members.
In one demonstration of the shared information bias, Stasser and Titus used an experimental design based on the hidden profile task, as shown in Table Students read descriptions of two candidates for a hypothetical student body presidential election and then met in groups to discuss and pick the best candidate.
The information about the candidates was arranged so that one of the candidates Candidate A had more positive qualities overall in comparison with the other Candidate B.
In these cases, although all the information was potentially available to the group, it was necessary that it be properly shared to make the correct choice. This occurred because although the group members had access to all the dissertation express individuals information collectively, the information that was not originally shared among all the group members was never discussed. Although the tendency to share information poorly seems to occur quite frequently, at least in experimentally created groups, dissertation express individuals, it does not occur equally under all conditions.
These findings suggest that an important job of the group leader is to continue group discussion until he or she is convinced that all the relevant information has been addressed, dissertation express individuals. Groups in which the members are more physically separated and thus have difficulty communicating with each other may find that they need to reorganize themselves to improve communication.
And the status of the group members can also be important. Group members with lower status may have less confidence and thus be unlikely to express their opinions. Wittenbaum found that group members with higher status were more likely to share dissertation express individuals information. However, those with higher status may sometimes dominate the discussion, even if the information that they have is not more valid or important Hinsz, Findings showing that groups neither share nor discuss originally unshared information have very disconcerting implications for group decision making because they suggest that group discussion is likely to lead to very poor judgments.
Not only is unshared information not brought to the table, but because the shared information is discussed repeatedly, it is likely to be seen as more valid and to have a greater influence on decisions as a result of its high cognitive accessibility.
It is not uncommon that individuals within a working group come to the discussion with different types of information, and this unshared information needs to be presented. For instance, in a meeting of a design team for a new building, the architects, the dissertation express individuals, and the customer representatives will have different and potentially incompatible information.
Thus dissertation express individuals of working groups must be aware of this problem and work hard to foster open climates that encourages information sharing and discussion. Given its obvious pitfalls, an interesting question to ask dissertation express individuals why the shared information bias seems to be so pervasive. Leading on from this, it could also reflect the tendency for people to wish to use groups to reinforce their own views, dissertation express individuals.
One technique that is frequently used to produce creative decisions in working groups is known as brainstorming. The technique was first developed by Osborn in an attempt to increase the effectiveness of group sessions at his advertising agency. Osborn felt that creative solutions would be increased when the group members generated a lot of ideas and when judgments about the quality of those ideas were initially deferred and only later evaluated. Dissertation express individuals brainstorming was based on the following rules:.
In fact, virtually all individual studies, as well as meta-analyses of those studies, find that regardless of the exact instructions given to a group, brainstorming groups do not generate as many ideas as one would expect, and the ideas that they do generate are usually of lesser dissertation express individuals than those generated by an equal number of individuals working alone who then share their results.
Thus brainstorming represents still another example of a case in which, despite the expectation of dissertation express individuals process gain by the group, a process loss is instead observed.
A number of explanations have been proposed for the failure of brainstorming to be effective, and many of these have been found to be important. One obvious problem is social loafing by the group members, and at least some research suggests that this does cause part of the problem. For instance, Paulus and Dzindolet found that social loafing in brainstorming groups occurred in part because individuals perceived that the other group members were not working very hard, and they matched they own behavior to this perceived norm.
To test the role of social loafing more directly, Diehl and Stroebe compared face-to-face brainstorming groups with equal numbers of individuals who worked alone; they found that face-to-face brainstorming groups generated fewer and less creative solutions than did an equal number of equivalent individuals working by themselves.
However, for some of the face-to-face groups, the researchers set up a television camera to record the contributions of each of the participants in order to make individual contributions to the discussion identifiable. Being identifiable reduced social loafing and increased the productivity of the individuals in the face-to-face groups; dissertation express individuals the face-to-face groups still did not perform as well as the individuals.
Even though individuals in brainstorming groups are told that no evaluation of the quality of the ideas is to be made, and thus that all ideas are good ones, individuals might nevertheless be unwilling to state some of their ideas in brainstorming groups because they are afraid that they will be negatively evaluated by the other group members.
Although social loafing and evaluation apprehension seem to cause some of the problem, the most important difficulty that reduces the effectiveness of brainstorming in face-to-face groups is that being with others in a group hinders opportunities for idea production and expression.
In a group, only one person can speak at a time, and this can cause people to forget their ideas because they are listening to others, or to miss what others are saying because they are thinking of their own ideasa problem known as production blocking. Considered another way, production blocking occurs because although individuals working alone can spend the entire available time generating ideas, participants in face-to-face groups must perform other tasks as well, and this reduces their creativity.
Diehl and Stroebe demonstrated the importance of production blocking in another experiment that compared individuals with groups. In this experiment, rather than changing things in the real group, they created production blocking in the individual conditions through a turn-taking procedure, such that the individuals, who were working in individual cubicles, had to express their ideas verbally into a microphone, but they were only able to speak when none of the other individuals was speaking.
Having to coordinate in this way decreased the performance of individuals such that they were no longer better than the face-to-face groups. While they are waiting, they tend to forget their ideas because they must concentrate on negotiating when it is going to be their turn to speak. In fact, even when the researchers gave the face-to-face dissertation express individuals extra time to perform the task to make up for having to wait for othersthey still did not reach the level of productivity of the individuals.
Although brainstorming is a classic example of a group process loss, there are ways to make dissertation express individuals more effective. The nominal group technique capitalizes on the use of individual sessions to generate initial ideas, followed by face-to-face group meetings to discuss and build on them. In this approach, participants first work alone to generate and write down their ideas before the group discussion starts, and the group then records the ideas that are generated.
In addition, a round-robin procedure is used to make sure that each individual has a chance to communicate his or her ideas. Contemporary advances in technology have created the ability for individuals to work together on creativity tasks via computer. These computer systems, generally known as group support systems, are used in many businesses and other organizations.
One use involves brainstorming on creativity tasks. Each individual in the group works at his or her own computer on the problem. As he or she writes suggestions or ideas, they are passed to the other group members via the computer network, so that each individual can see the suggestions of all the group members, including their own. Each individual has the comments of all the other group members handy and can read them when it is convenient.
The individual can alternate between reading the comments of dissertation express individuals and writing his or her own comments and therefore is not dissertation express individuals to wait to dissertation express individuals his or her ideas.
In summary, the most important conclusion to be dissertation express individuals from the literature on brainstorming is that the technique is less effective than expected because group members are required to do other things in addition to being creative, dissertation express individuals. However, this does not necessarily mean that brainstorming is not useful overall, and modifications of the original brainstorming procedures have been found to be quite effective in producing creative thinking in groups.
Techniques that make use of initial individual thought, which is later followed by group discussion, represent the best approaches to brainstorming and group creativity.
When you are in a group that needs to make a decision, you can make use of this knowledge. Ask the group members to spend some time thinking about and writing down their own ideas before the group begins its discussion. One common decision-making task of groups is to come to a consensus regarding a judgment, dissertation express individuals, such as where to hold a party, whether a defendant dissertation express individuals innocent or guilty, or how much money a corporation should invest in a dissertation express individuals product.
Whenever a majority of members in the group favors a given opinion, even if that majority is very slim, the group is likely to end up adopting that majority opinion. Although groups generally do show pressures toward conformity, the tendency to side with the majority after group discussion turns out to be even stronger than this. It is commonly found that groups make even more extreme decisions, in dissertation express individuals direction of the existing norm, dissertation express individuals, than we would predict they would, given the initial opinions of the group members.
This may seem surprising, given the widespread belief that groups tend to push people toward consensus and the middle-ground in decision making. Actually, they may often lead to more extreme decisions being made than those that individuals would have taken on their own.
Group polarization was initially observed using problems in which the group members had to indicate how an individual should choose between a risky, but very positive, outcome and a certain, but less desirable, outcome Stoner,
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Dissertation. Exploring the meso-system: the relationship between unmet health care needs, access to medical home services, and parent-perceived autism severity by Pei Huang. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa. University of Iowa. Summer Will definition, am (is, are, etc.) about or going to: I will be there tomorrow. She will see you at dinner. See more A critical evaluation of the employment law of disabled individuals in the US. What policies should be integrated to enhance its efficiency? Commercial Law Dissertation Topics. Commercial law is another broad area of legal practice that deals with laws related to persons, businesses, and merchants engaging in sales, trade, and commerce
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