Individual Group Members (individual + group_member)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


The Etiology of Individual-Targeted Intolerance: Group Stereotypes and Judgments of Individual Group Members

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2000
Ewa A. Golebiowska
Virtually all scientific writing on attitudes toward political unorthodoxy in the United States focuses on group-targeted tolerance, or the question of whether Americans are willing to extend constitutional rights and freedoms to groups outside the political mainstream. Less is known about the etiology of individual-targeted tolerance, or the question of whether Americans are willing to tolerate the exercise of constitutional rights and freedoms by individuals who belong to unpopular groups. This paper examines the sources of attitudes toward individuals belonging to disliked and stereotyped political groups,in particular, the extent to which political tolerance judgments about gay and racist targets are influenced by attributes of those targets that are either consistent or inconsistent with group stereotypes. In line with expectations, an empirical analysis showed that individuals exhibiting attributes inconsistent with their group's stereotype (whether neutral with respect to stereotypic beliefs or directly challenging them) are tolerated more than those with stereotype-consistent attributes. Because members of political outgroups can control the timing of disclosing their group membership, they have the power to determine whether and to what extent stereotypic beliefs associated with their group will influence the reactions they provoke. This analysis confirms that the impact of stereotypic beliefs on tolerance varies as a function of timing of group membership revelation, although the direction of this interaction depends on the intensity of dislike for the group of which the individual target is a member. [source]


Past success and convergent thinking in groups: The role of group-focused attributions

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2004
Jack A. Goncalo
Past success often causes groups to think narrowly around strategies that have worked in the past, even when environmental change has rendered these strategies ineffective. From a psychological perspective, this research seems to indicate that past success may give rise to convergent thinking in groups. Why might successful groups be prone to convergent thinking? I argue that the relationship between past success and convergent thinking may depend on the attributions that groups generate to explain their shared success. In this paper, I focus on two distinct attributions at the group level: Individual-focused attributions that reflect the idiosyncratic characteristics of individual group members and group-focused attributions that reflect the emergent properties of the group as a whole. I found that group-focused attributions for past success cause groups to generate fewer ideas that are, on average, more convergent. In contrast, individual-focused attributions cause groups to generate more ideas that are on average more divergent. These findings suggest that the experience of success may actually stimulate divergent thinking depending on how a group chooses to explain it. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Stereotypes and Shifting Standards: Some Paradoxical Effects of Cognitive Load

JOURNAL OF APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 10 2003
Monica Biernat
Four studies tested a prediction derived from the shifting-standards model (Biernat, Manis, & Nelson, 1991) regarding the role stereotypes play in judgments of individual group members. Previous research has documented that stereotyping effects are stronger on objective than on subjective response scales, and the present studies found that these effects were intensified when participants were under heavy cognitive load. Stereotyping effects increased on objective judgment scales, but decreased on subjective scales. The latter is a paradoxical effect: By relying on stereotypes, one may increasingly use them as within-category comparative standards, which leads to the apparent reduction of stereotyping effects. [source]


When groups decide to use asynchronous online discussions: collaborative learning and social presence under a voluntary participation structure

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER ASSISTED LEARNING, Issue 2 2009
H.-J. So
Abstract The purpose of this study is to explore how groups decide to use asynchronous online discussion forums in a non-mandatory setting, and, after the group decision is made, how group members use online discussion forums to complete a collaborative learning project requiring complex data gathering and research processes. While a large body of research on computer-mediated communication (CMC) has documented successful intervention strategies to promote and sustain online discussion forums, little of the research has examined the use of online discussion forums in voluntarily contexts, wherein the decision to use online discussion forums is a personal decision and participation is not a graded component. This study approaches the research questions using a naturalistic case study of one graduate-level blended learning course with 55 students. Employing both student interviews and content analysis methods, this study revealed that the factors affecting the group decision to use online discussion forums are (1) successful or unsuccessful experiences during the first trial, (2) perceived affordances of CMC tools, and (3) the interplay between the nature of collaborative tasks and perceived efficiency. The content analysis of online postings in two voluntary groups revealed that when groups decided to use online discussion forums, participation levels were almost equal among individual group members, and discussion threads were sustained until the final completion of the collaborative project. [source]


Data-driven identification of group dynamics for motion prediction and control

JOURNAL OF FIELD ROBOTICS (FORMERLY JOURNAL OF ROBOTIC SYSTEMS), Issue 6-7 2008
Mac Schwager
A distributed model structure for representing groups of coupled dynamic agents is proposed, and the least-squares method is used for fitting model parameters based on measured position data. The difference equation model embodies a minimalist approach, incorporating only factors essential to the movement and interaction of physical bodies. The model combines effects from an agent's inertia, interactions between agents, and interactions between each agent and its environment. Global positioning system tracking data were collected in field experiments from a group of 3 cows and a group of 10 cows over the course of several days using custom-designed, head-mounted sensor boxes. These data are used with the least-squares method to fit the model to the cow groups. The modeling technique is shown to capture overall characteristics of the group as well as attributes of individual group members. Applications to livestock management are described, and the potential for surveillance, prediction, and control of various kinds of groups of dynamic agents are suggested. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]