INFLUENCES OF GROUPS

Positive and Negative Influences Of Groups On People

Positive and Negative Influences Of Groups On People

Introduction

A group or persons around a child shape the identity by one way or another. This starts happening from a very early time after a child is born. As a kid, it can be teachers and parents and in afterward life, class fellows, friends and colleagues. Persons have several dissimilar characters in their life, these functions provide several rationales. Persons also discover that they are a member of diverse groups in which they play their diverse functions, it structures the group identity of any individual. The group can have a positive or a negative influences on people. The standards of the group are supposed to be followed by all group associates, and it may also cause group associates being anticipated to match with others. Deviation may frequently initiate group pressure and role conflict to pursue the group customs, and eventually the group affects individual negatively or positively. This paper discusses positive and negative influences of groups on people.

Discussion

In social psychology the term has been applied to virtually all collective entities with which individuals can be identified, including families, gangs, crowds, teams, committees, juries, parliaments, communities, tribes, clubs, associations, organisations, nation states and even culturally or biologically defined categories. Virtually every social psychological process of any consequence is thought to be affected by the particular group or groups to which individuals belong or with which they identify, making 'group' a fundamental analytic category for the discipline. Despite this, it has not been easy to identify the crucial defining features of a group or decide what, psychologically speaking, all groups have in common.

Around the turn of the twentieth century several influential arguments (LeBon, McDougall, Freud) converged on the idea that, at the very least, the behaviour of people in groups is qualitatively different from their behaviour as individuals, and that perhaps groups should be regarded as distinct psychological entities, possessing a 'group mind' and acting virtually as discrete sentient organisms. This was soon to be challenged by Floyd Allport (1924) with the claim that behaviour can only be analysed at the level of the individual. His challenge provoked, from the 1930s, a range of initiatives to demonstrate experimentally that group phenomena are not reducible to individual behaviour, e.g. studies of norms, conformity, polarisation. (Brehm 2006, 25)

But pinning down the defining features of groups has remained a problem. Among the features proposed have been common fate or interdependence, internal structure (distinctions of role and social status) and face-to-face interaction. However, it has also been argued that all these are variable features and none is necessary. One response has been the proposal that group is essentially a psychological construct in the minds of individuals, a way individuals think about themselves and their relation to the social world. Thus, self-categorisation theory treats group as a categorisation of the self at a higher level of inclusion than individual, arguing that a fundamental shift in psychological functioning follows when this ...