Quiz — Chapter 37: Group Dynamics, Conformity, and Collective Behavior

Instructions

25 multiple-choice questions. Select the single best answer. Answer key with explanations follows.

Questions

1. Robert Zajonc's theory of social facilitation and inhibition proposed that the presence of others:

A) Always improves performance through competition effects B) Produces arousal that facilitates dominant responses and impairs complex or novel behaviors C) Only affects performance when the audience is evaluating the performer D) Reduces performance through increased distraction

2. Social loafing is most effectively reduced by which of the following?

A) Increasing group size to create more social comparison B) Making individual contributions identifiable and attributable C) Assigning the task to the most capable group member D) Reducing time pressure on the group task

3. In Max Ringelmann's rope-pulling research, what pattern was observed?

A) Individual pulling effort increased as group size increased B) Individual pulling effort remained constant regardless of group size C) Individual pulling effort decreased as group size increased D) Pulling effort was determined primarily by individual motivation

4. Deindividuation is most likely to occur when which combination of conditions is present?

A) High individual accountability, high task complexity, physical isolation B) Anonymity, reduced self-awareness, group immersion, and arousal C) Strong individual identity, clear group norms, low time pressure D) Direct observation, high-stakes outcomes, small group size

5. Irving Janis identified "mindguards" in groupthink as:

A) Group members assigned to evaluate the decision from an outsider's perspective B) Group members who self-appoint to protect the group from disturbing information C) Formal facilitators who maintain meeting structure D) Senior leaders who review decisions before implementation

6. Which of the following is NOT one of Janis's eight symptoms of groupthink?

A) Illusion of invulnerability B) Out-group homogeneity effect C) Self-censorship D) Illusion of unanimity

7. James Surowiecki's conditions for collective wisdom include all of the following EXCEPT:

A) Diversity of opinion B) Independence of judgment before social influence C) High group cohesion among members D) An aggregation mechanism for combining judgments

8. In Darley and Latané's bystander research, the mechanism by which multiple witnesses reduced helping behavior through ambiguity interpretation is called:

A) Diffusion of responsibility B) Pluralistic ignorance C) Evaluative apprehension D) Social loafing

9. The bystander effect is reduced when:

A) More people witness the emergency B) The emergency occurs in a crowded public space C) A specific individual is directly asked for help D) The bystanders are strangers to each other

10. In Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, approximately what percentage of participants administered the maximum (450-volt) shock?

A) 10% B) 35% C) 65% D) 90%

11. Milgram's concept of the "agentic state" refers to:

A) A state of heightened personal moral awareness during authority interactions B) A shift from autonomous agent to agent of the authority, in which responsibility is attributed to the authority C) The increased efficiency that occurs when people work under clear authority direction D) The psychological state of a person who refuses to comply with authority directives

12. In Milgram's variation studies, which condition produced the LOWEST rates of compliance?

A) The learner protesting loudly in the adjacent room B) The authority giving instructions by telephone rather than in person C) The experiment conducted at a community facility rather than Yale D) The participant and learner in the same room

13. Which of the following variation conditions in Milgram's research produced the most dramatic DECREASE in obedience?

A) Adding a second authority figure who disagreed with the experimenter B) Two confederate teachers who refused to continue the experiment C) Changing the shock apparatus to appear more dangerous D) Allowing the participant to choose the shock level independently

14. Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian's Emergent Norm Theory differs from Le Bon's crowd psychology primarily in that:

A) It focuses on crowds in stable rather than crisis situations B) It argues that crowd behavior is governed by emerging situational norms rather than collective irrationality C) It attributes crowd behavior to deliberate coordination by crowd leaders D) It denies that crowds have any distinctive psychological properties

15. Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd (1895) proposed that crowds:

A) Make better collective decisions than individuals through pooled information B) Produce emergent behavioral norms that constrain individual action C) Cause individuals to lose individuality, become highly suggestible, and behave more impulsively D) Organize rationally around shared political grievances

16. Research on collective action and social movements indicates that participation is driven by which combination of factors?

A) Individual self-interest, risk tolerance, and information about outcomes B) Collective identity, perceived injustice, and collective efficacy C) Group cohesion, authority leadership, and external threat D) Resource availability, network density, and media attention

17. Amy Edmondson's research identified psychological safety as the strongest predictor of team effectiveness. Psychological safety refers to:

A) Physical safety from hazards in the work environment B) Confidence that interpersonal risks such as speaking up or disagreeing will not be punished C) Team members' agreement that the task is not overly dangerous D) Protection from external competitive threats to the team's position

18. Google's Project Aristotle finding on team performance was that:

A) Individual skill and talent of team members predicted performance most strongly B) Structural clarity (clear roles, goals, processes) was the most important predictor C) Psychological safety was the most consistent predictor of high team performance D) Team size and composition diversity predicted performance most strongly

19. Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment primarily demonstrated:

A) That aggression is a stable individual trait that emerges across contexts B) That people are highly resistant to playing roles that conflict with their values C) The powerful effect of situational role assignment on behavior D) That prisoners reliably become more passive and guards more aggressive in all prison contexts

20. The "two-pizza rule" attributed to Jeff Bezos (team size that can be fed by two pizzas) reflects research findings that:

A) Remote teams require more members to compensate for reduced communication B) Small teams have lower process losses and higher individual accountability C) Teams of 8–12 are optimal for most creative and strategic tasks D) Food sharing improves team performance through positive mood effects

21. The Kitty Genovese case (however inaccurate in its original reporting) prompted social psychological research because it raised the question of:

A) Why individuals become deindividuated in urban environments B) Why witnesses to emergencies sometimes fail to help even when individually capable C) How mob mentality develops in dense urban settings D) Why bystanders in groups conform to anti-helping norms

22. Social facilitation effects are MOST likely to improve performance in which of the following scenarios?

A) A novice surgeon performing a complex procedure for the first time B) A student learning a new mathematical concept C) An experienced musician performing a piece they have played hundreds of times D) A writer working on the first draft of a difficult chapter

23. In Milgram's agentic state theory, what makes the agentic shift psychologically possible?

A) The authority's superior knowledge about the consequences of the experiment B) The gradual escalation of the shocks, each small step building on the prior one C) The legitimacy of the hierarchy, which allows participants to attribute responsibility to the authority D) Physical distance from the victim, which reduces emotional engagement

24. Which of the following best captures the limits of the situationist interpretation of Milgram's findings?

A) The results cannot be generalized because the sample was not representative B) Not all participants complied fully; dispositional factors predicted variation within the situational constraints C) The electric shocks were not real, so behavior in the experiment cannot predict real-world behavior D) The authority figure was not a real scientist, making the authority gradient artificial

25. Research on groupthink remedies consistently supports which structural intervention as most effective?

A) Requiring unanimous agreement before implementing any decision B) Rotating leadership across group decisions C) Designating a devil's advocate role and encouraging the leader to withhold initial preferences D) Conducting all important decisions through anonymous vote

Answer Key

1. B — Zajonc's drive theory: others' presence increases arousal, which facilitates well-learned, dominant responses and impairs complex, novel behaviors. This explains the contradictory early social facilitation findings — better performance on easy tasks, worse on difficult ones.

2. B — Social loafing decreases when individual contributions are identifiable. When accountability is clear, diffusion of responsibility cannot operate. Other conditions that help: task meaningfulness, group cohesion, small size.

3. C — Ringelmann found that individual rope-pulling effort decreased as group size grew. With 2 people, each pulled 93% of individual maximum; with 8, each pulled 49%. The pattern holds across many collective tasks.

4. B — Deindividuation conditions: anonymity (reduced identification), reduced self-awareness (attention externalized), group immersion (identity absorbed into group), and arousal (impairs deliberate processing). All four together produce the strongest deindividuation effects.

5. B — Mindguards are self-appointed group members who protect the group from information that might challenge the preferred direction. They filter out disconfirming evidence and discourage members from seeking outside consultation.

6. B — The out-group homogeneity effect (from Social Identity Theory/Chapter 36) is not one of Janis's eight groupthink symptoms. Janis's eight: illusion of invulnerability, collective rationalization, belief in morality, stereotyped views of outgroups, pressure on dissenters, self-censorship, illusion of unanimity, self-appointed mindguards.

7. C — High group cohesion is actually a condition that UNDERMINES collective wisdom by producing social pressure toward consensus. Surowiecki's four conditions: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, aggregation. Cohesion is a characteristic of groupthink, not wisdom of crowds.

8. B — Pluralistic ignorance: in ambiguous situations, people look to others for cues; if everyone else appears calm (because they too are waiting for cues), each person concludes the situation is not serious, producing a collective failure to recognize an emergency. Diffusion of responsibility is the other mechanism (answer A), but operates through perceived personal obligation, not through information about emergency severity.

9. C — Direct, specific request to a named individual eliminates diffusion of responsibility by directing personal accountability. "You, in the blue jacket — please call 911" is much more effective than a general appeal to bystanders. Fewer witnesses (not more, answer A) also reduce the effect.

10. C — 65% of Milgram's participants administered the maximum 450-volt shock. This result shocked the research community; expert predictions had been under 1%. The finding has been partially replicated by Jerry Burger (2009), who found 70% compliance to 150 volts (the point where the learner demanded to be released).

11. B — The agentic state: entering a hierarchical authority relationship shifts people from autonomous agency (acting on their own values) to agency in service of the authority (executing the authority's agenda). In the agentic state, people feel responsible to the authority for compliance, not to themselves for the moral quality of actions.

12. B — Telephone authority produced very low compliance (approximately 20%) — far lower than face-to-face authority. Physical presence of the authority is essential to maintaining authority's power. When the experimenter left the room, compliance dropped dramatically.

13. B — Two confederate teachers who refused to continue produced a drop from 65% to about 10% compliance. Breaking the unanimity of the group — providing social support for dissent — was the most powerful single manipulation. Consistent with Moscovici's minority influence research.

14. B — Emergent Norm Theory argues that crowd behavior is governed by situationally emerging norms, not by collective irrationality (Le Bon) or collective mind. This explains why most crowd behavior is orderly and normatively constrained, even in emergency situations.

15. C — Le Bon's core argument: crowds produce a collective mind through submergence of individual identity; crowds are irrational, emotional, suggestible, and impulsive. This was enormously influential despite having no systematic empirical foundation and reflecting clear class-based anxieties about mass political movements.

16. B — Collective action research: participation is driven by collective identity (sense of shared group membership), perceived injustice (belief that the group is being wrongly treated), and collective efficacy (belief that collective action can produce change). When all three are present, mobilization is most likely.

17. B — Psychological safety (Edmondson): the belief that one can speak up, disagree, ask questions, and make mistakes without being punished or humiliated. The key is interpersonal safety for risk-taking, not physical or competitive safety.

18. C — Project Aristotle's finding: of the five team dynamics they studied, psychological safety was by far the most important predictor of team performance. This surprised the Google researchers, who had expected to find that individual skill or team composition explained most of the variance.

19. C — The Stanford Prison Experiment primarily demonstrated situational role power: ordinary people who were randomly assigned to roles rapidly adopted those roles' behavioral patterns. The guard role produced authoritarian and cruel behavior in participants who showed no such tendencies before the study.

20. B — Small teams have lower process losses (coordination costs, social loafing, status effects on participation) and higher individual accountability. The research supports groups of 5–7 for most decision-making tasks; the "two-pizza rule" approximates this range.

21. B — The Kitty Genovese case (however distorted in its original media coverage) prompted Darley and Latané to study why witnesses fail to help, leading to the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility research. The case became the catalyst for a paradigm shift in understanding prosocial behavior.

22. C — Zajonc's prediction: social facilitation improves well-practiced, dominant responses. An experienced musician performing a well-rehearsed piece benefits from the arousal of an audience. Novice performers (answer A), learners (answer B), and writers producing first drafts (answer D) are all in contexts where complex, non-dominant behavior is required — predicting inhibition rather than facilitation.

23. C — The agentic shift is possible because hierarchical relationships have legitimate social meaning: we accept that in institutional contexts, authority figures bear responsibility for outcomes. This legitimacy allows people to attribute moral responsibility upward — "I was following orders" — in a way that is sincere, not merely post-hoc rationalization. Gradual escalation (answer B) also contributes but is distinct from what makes the shift psychologically possible.

24. B — The situationist reading is important but incomplete: not everyone complied. About 35% refused at some point before the maximum, and the timing and form of refusal varied. Dispositional factors — moral courage, discomfort with authority, prior attitudes toward harm — predicted variation within the situational constraints. Situation and disposition both matter.

25. C — Research supports designating a devil's advocate and having the leader withhold initial preferences until the group has formed independent views. This addresses two core groupthink mechanisms: conformity pressure from the leader (reduced by withholding preferences) and the suppression of dissent (reduced by legitimizing and formalizing the dissent role). Anonymous voting (D) helps but is less consistently effective.

Score: 23–25 = Excellent | 19–22 = Strong | 15–18 = Review flagged sections | Below 15 = Re-read the chapter