PSYC 405 Week 1 DB Forum 1 Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread and Two Replies

PSYC 405 Group Dynamics, Discussion Board Forum 1 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; the textbook and the journal article are real and described from their published sources; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for PSYC 405.

Thread

Seven people wait at a bus stop on a cold morning. They stand close together, face the same direction and share the same goal, getting to work, yet few would call them a group. On Thursday nights, seven people at my church rehearse as a worship team. They plan songs together, adjust to one another's timing and depend on each other on Sunday morning. Most people would call the team a group without hesitation.

Forsyth (2017) defines a group as two or more individuals who are connected by and within social relationships. The definition explains the difference. The people at the bus stop are near one another but not connected; if one leaves, the others are unaffected. The worship team members are linked by relationships and by interdependence, since a missed cue by the drummer changes what the singers must do. Forsyth also notes that groups vary in entitativity, the degree to which they seem to be a single unit.

Lickel et al. (2000) studied how people perceive that quality. In two parallel studies, run with American and then Polish students, participants rated 40 kinds of groups on properties such as size, duration, interaction and similarity, then sorted them by how alike they seemed. Four types emerged consistently: intimacy groups such as families and close friends, task groups such as committees and work teams, social categories such as women or Americans, and loose associations such as people waiting in line. Groups high in interaction among members were seen as the most unified, and in a third study participants valued membership most in the groups they saw as most entitative.

Using that typology, my family is an intimacy group, the worship team a task group with some intimacy qualities and my membership in the category of Virginians a social category that rarely feels like a group at all.

Classmates: which of your groups would you rate highest in entitativity, and is it also the one you value most?

Reply to Natalie

Natalie, your online knitting forum is a good test of the definition. Members never meet in person, but Forsyth (2017) defines a group by social relationships, not physical presence, and you described regular members who recognize one another, answer each other's questions and have developed inside jokes. That sounds like interaction and some interdependence, the properties Lickel et al. (2000) found most closely tied to seeing a collection of people as a real group. I wonder whether the forum's newer members, who post once and leave, feel the same. Perhaps an online group can be a task group for its core and a loose association for everyone else.

Reply to Brandon

Brandon, your description of a sales team that never felt like a team was familiar. You were all assigned to the same manager and goal, but each person worked separate accounts and was paid on individual commission. In the textbook's terms (Forsyth, 2017), the team had a common label but little interdependence, since no one's results depended on anyone else's work. Lickel et al. (2000) found that common goals and outcomes, along with interaction, made groups seem more unified. A shared bonus for the team's total, or pairing members on large accounts, might have turned a social category into a task group. Did your manager ever try anything like that?

References

Forsyth, D. R. (2017). Group dynamics (7th ed.). Cengage.

Lickel, B., Hamilton, D. L., Wieczorkowska, G., Lewis, A., Sherman, S. J., & Uhles, A. N. (2000). Varieties of groups and the perception of group entitativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 223-246. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.223