Membership, Prototypicality, and Influence in Small Groups

南卡罗来纳州大学克里斯托弗·巴努姆大学的巴里·马尔科夫斯基这项研究研究了集体任务环境中地位和小组成员身份的联合影响。在这些背景下，人们聚集在一起解决共同的问题--从政党的政策制定委员会到非正式聚会，比如一群陌生人努力从雪堆中解救一辆被困的汽车。在达成集体解决方案的过程中往往存在复杂性和模棱两可的情况，因此在这种情况下，人们相互寻求指导。在缺乏更明确的知识的情况下，在这种情况下，参与者根据可观察到的特征对彼此的能力进行推断是很常见的。先前的研究表明，人们使用关于群体成员身份和地位特征的信息来形成对彼此任务表现的期望。自我归类理论侧重于群体成员的认知方面对交互的影响，地位特征理论研究了年龄、种族、性别和能力等属性对交互的影响。尽管这些理论有一些共同的研究领域，但到目前为止，两者之间几乎没有重叠。研究人员将进行一系列实验，以测试这两种理论的整合，以研究群体成员的认知方面，以及社会特征对成员对彼此任务贡献的评价的影响。这些实验将检验这样一种预测，即按照群体原型行事或被视为群体成员会增强影响力，此外，这种影响可以通过引入某些其他社会特征的信息来抵消，比如教育水平。本研究为评估自我归类和状态特征理论在后续应用和干预方面的潜力提供了严格的检验和关键数据。这项工作建立在一个新的、综合的研究计划之上，该计划扩大了社会学社会心理学中两个长期存在的理论的适用范围。这项研究有助于一种新的地位干预，有助于在学校环境中进行一系列应用研究，改变了课堂互动--成为一个被接受的小组成员是增加课堂参与度和学习最重要的因素

SES-0853593Barry MarkovskyChristopher BarnumUniversity of South CarolinaThis research studies the joint effects of status and group membership in collective task settings. In these settings, people come together to solve common problems--from policy-setting committees in political parties to informal gatherings such as a group of strangers working to free a stuck car from a snow bank. Frequently there are complexities and ambiguities in the course of reaching collective solutions, and so people in such settings look to one another for guidance. In the absence of more explicit knowledge, it is common for participants in such settings to make inferences about one another's abilities on the basis of observable characteristics. Previous research demonstrates that people use information on group memberships and status characteristics to form expectations for one anothers' task performances. Self categorization theory has focused on the effect that the cognitive aspects of group membership have on interaction, and status characteristics theory has studied how attributes such as age, race, gender and ability effect interaction. Although these theories share some common areas of investigation, to date there has been little overlap between the two. The investigators will conduct a set of experiments to test an integration of the two theories to study the cognitive aspects of group membership and the impact of social characteristics on members' evaluations of one another's task contributions. The experiments will test predictions that influence is enhanced by acting in accord with group prototypes or by being perceived as an in-group member and, further, that such effects can be countervailed by introducing information on certain other social characteristics such as education levels. The research provides stringent tests and crucial data for evaluating the self categorization and status characteristics theories' potential for subsequent applications and interventions. This work builds on a nascent, integrative research program that expands the ranges of applicability of two long-standing theories in sociological social psychology. The research contributes to a new kind of status intervention, contributing to a body of applied research in school settings that has transformed classroom interactions--being an accepted member of a group is what counts most for increased classroom participation and thus learning