Chapter 34 Exercises: Confronting Groups, Committees, and Crowds

Section A: Conceptual Understanding

Exercise 34.1 [Conceptual] ★ In your own words, explain the difference between social facilitation and social loafing. Give one example of each from your own experience in group settings (school, work, clubs, family, etc.). How do these dynamics interact in a typical meeting?

Exercise 34.2 [Conceptual] ★ Describe the Abilene Paradox in your own words. Have you ever been in a situation where a group arrived at a decision that no one actually wanted? What happened? How did it happen? Looking back, at what point could the Paradox have been interrupted?

Exercise 34.3 [Conceptual] ★★ Explain why conformity in Asch's experiments operates at an epistemic level (affecting people's perception of reality), not just a social level (affecting what they say). Why is this distinction important for understanding why meetings go wrong? What does it imply about the experience of a lone dissenter?

Exercise 34.4 [Conceptual] ★★ Janis identified eight symptoms of groupthink. Review them and then identify which three you think are the most dangerous — the ones most likely to lead to catastrophic decisions. Defend your ranking. Are there any symptoms you think Janis missed?

Exercise 34.5 [Conceptual] ★ Explain how the "early-bird strategy" works psychologically. Why does timing matter for raising concerns in meetings? At what point in a meeting does conformity pressure peak, and why?

Exercise 34.6 [Conceptual] ★★ The chapter describes the "complainer dynamic" in teams as a failure mode where conflict is routed through the manager rather than addressed directly. Why is this a problem for teams even when the manager makes good decisions? What does the team lose in this dynamic?

Exercise 34.7 [Conceptual] ★★★ The chapter proposes that group settings change confrontation in fundamental ways. But one could argue the opposite: that groups provide more safety for dissent because no single person is targeted, and that the social proof of others' support makes it easier to raise concerns. Evaluate both sides of this argument. Under what conditions does each apply?

Section B: Scenario Analysis

Exercise 34.8 [Scenario] ★★ Marcus is in a meeting at his paralegal job. His supervisor Diane is proposing a filing strategy for a case that Marcus believes is incorrect — he recently read a relevant ruling she may not have seen. The other two paralegals in the room are nodding. Diane has already said "I think we're all agreed on this." Analyze this situation: what groupthink symptoms are present? What should Marcus do, given the power dynamics from Chapter 33? Write out exactly what he should say.

Exercise 34.9 [Scenario] ★★ Jade is in a student government meeting where the committee is about to vote on a budget allocation that Jade believes disadvantages first-generation students. The chair (a third-year student she does not know well) is moving quickly toward a vote. There are eight people in the room. Jade has never spoken up in this committee before. What strategies from this chapter apply? What are the risks? Write out what Jade should say before the vote is called.

Exercise 34.10 [Scenario] ★★★ A team of seven people at a tech company is in a meeting about launching a new product feature. Six of them are enthusiastic. The seventh — a junior engineer — has identified a potential security vulnerability that hasn't been discussed. The rest of the team has not asked about security because the feature lead has said it is "low-risk." Analyze the group dynamics at play. What should the junior engineer do? Write out their specific words, including how to handle the likely response that "the security team already reviewed it."

Exercise 34.11 [Scenario] ★★ Sam's operations team has two camps on a process question, and the conflict has been running for two weeks. Sam decides to run the team conflict protocol described in Section 34.5. Write the full script for how Sam opens the meeting, including: (a) naming the conflict, (b) establishing the process, (c) naming the shared goal. Then write what Sam says when one team member says "I just feel like my concerns aren't being taken seriously."

Exercise 34.12 [Scenario] ★★ Priya makes a public objection in the committee meeting and achieves a one-meeting table rather than an outright rejection of the proposal. A colleague approaches her afterward and says: "That was brave, but Harmon is going to come back next month with his data and push it through." What should Priya do in the time between now and the next meeting? Apply strategies from both this chapter and Chapter 33.

Exercise 34.13 [Scenario] ★★★ You are on a faculty hiring committee at a university. The committee of six is strongly inclined toward a candidate who is a personal friend of the committee chair. The other candidate has stronger qualifications by most objective measures. The chair has made it clear he "really likes" the first candidate and has several times in the meeting reframed the second candidate's strengths as weaknesses. No one else has objected. You are the most junior member of the committee. Identify at least four groupthink symptoms present in this scenario. Then write out the sequence of interventions you would attempt, from lowest to highest risk.

Section C: Applied Practice

Exercise 34.14 [Applied] ★★ Observe a real meeting (work, class, organization, family) and take notes on the group dynamics. Specifically, document: (a) how many times individual opinions visibly shifted in the direction of the apparent consensus; (b) any moments where someone seemed to have a concern but did not voice it (you can tell by body language, hesitation, or other cues); (c) any moments where the early-bird strategy was used or could have been used. Write a one-page analysis of what you observed.

Exercise 34.15 [Applied] ★★★ Design a meeting agenda for a high-stakes decision in your field or discipline. In the design, build in structural protections against groupthink: specify who holds the devil's advocate role, include a step for independent individual assessment before group discussion, and include a step for soliciting outside input. Write a brief rationale for each structural element.

Exercise 34.16 [Applied] ★★ Write a pre-meeting note for the following situation: You are attending a budget committee meeting and you have a concern about a line item that seems to have been miscalculated. You are not certain — you may be reading the spreadsheet incorrectly — but you want to flag it before the group votes to approve the budget. The note should be appropriately confident given your uncertainty, and should not be either dismissive of your concern or alarmist.

Exercise 34.17 [Applied] ★★★ Practice the full public objection sequence. Choose a real situation (current or past) where you were in a group moving in a direction you disagreed with. Write out: 1. Your signal of genuine engagement 2. Your specific, clear concern 3. Your brief reasoning 4. Your question to the group (not just the chair) 5. Your response to the most likely pushback 6. How you hold your position while remaining open to genuine persuasion

Exercise 34.18 [Applied] ★★ Write the follow-up email Priya might send to the Quality Assurance Manager after the committee meeting where her concern was tabled. The email should: confirm what was agreed, specify what she expects to be in the next meeting packet, and offer to share her own data on transfer patterns. Make it professional, specific, and not aggressive.

Section D: Synthesis

Exercise 34.19 [Synthesis] ★★★ Compare the challenge of speaking up in a meeting where you are junior/low-power (Marcus's situation) with the challenge of speaking up in a meeting where you have significant formal power but are still in the minority (Priya's situation). What is similar about both challenges? What is different? Which is harder, and why? What resources does each person have that the other doesn't?

Exercise 34.20 [Synthesis] ★★★ The research on groupthink (Janis) and the research on psychological safety (Edmondson) point in the same direction: group decision quality is determined primarily by structural conditions, not individual skill or courage. Evaluate this claim. If true, what does it imply for how organizations should design meetings and decision processes? If only partially true, what role does individual skill play?

Exercise 34.21 [Synthesis] ★★ "Silence in a meeting should never be taken as agreement." Build the case for this proposition, using evidence from Asch, Janis, and the other research discussed in this chapter. Then consider: if silence is not agreement, what should meeting chairs and facilitators do instead? Write three specific facilitation practices that would elicit genuine views rather than compliant silence.

Exercise 34.22 [Synthesis] ★★★ Design a ninety-minute workshop on "Speaking Up in Meetings" for a team of twelve people in a mid-sized organization. The team is culturally diverse and includes people at different levels of organizational seniority. What are the three most important things you want participants to leave knowing how to do? What exercises would you include? How would you handle the power dynamics in the room (some participants outrank others) that might reproduce the very problem you are trying to address?

Exercise 34.23 [Synthesis] ★★★ The chapter presents distributed accountability — teams owning their conflict together — as superior to the manager-as-arbiter model. However, there are situations where a team genuinely cannot resolve its own conflict and the manager needs to decide. Write a framework for when a manager should facilitate distributed resolution versus when they should step in and decide. What signals tell you which approach is appropriate?

Exercise 34.24 [Synthesis] ★★ Evaluate the "devil's advocate" role as an intervention against groupthink. What are its strengths? What are its limitations? Under what conditions does it work well, and under what conditions does it fail or backfire? What would you recommend as a more effective alternative, and why?

Exercise 34.25 [Synthesis] ★★★ Social media and online discussion forums are, in some ways, group settings with dynamics analogous to those described in this chapter — conformity pressure, pile-on effects, self-censorship, and the diffusion of responsibility. Apply three concepts from this chapter to the online group dynamics you have observed. Where do the analogies hold, and where do they break down? What does this tell you about the universality of the group psychology research?