1
The Reality of Groups

In this book, the existence of human groups is taken for granted: We have assumed both the reality of groups and some agreement over what we mean when we use the word 'group.' But, in fact, both of these assumptions have been the subject of considerable controversy in the history of social psychology. Since the turn of the twentieth century, there have been heated debates not just about what groups are but whether, indeed, they exist at all. This chapter returns to those debates in order to clarify some of the issues that will recur throughout the book. We begin, conventionally enough, with a definition of the group which, while admittedly imprecise, will at least provide us with a few signposts to guide us through the terrain ahead. The discussion then turns to the question of the relationship between the individual and the group: is the latter reducible to the former or can they both be considered as real and inter-related entities? Our answer to this question stresses the importance of making a distinction between behaviour when one is acting as a group member and behaviour when one is acting as an individual, and we outline some of the social psychological processes that underlie this distinction. A key concept here, as indeed it will be throughout the book, is that of social identity - people's sense of who they are and the importance of that self-definition to them. Which social identities matter to people and when is not something set in stone however; it usually depends on the situations they find themselves in or, more generally, on the social context. This is the second concept which will recur in the pages to follow. How we evaluate our group memberships and their meaning for us depends on other groups in our environment, on social structural factors (such as status and power), and on wider cultural factors (such as prevailing value systems). Groups are also important because they allow us to achieve our objectives. They are, in other words, vehicles for social action, often in pursuit of social change, and this is the third theme we emphasise in this book.

Definition

Even the most superficial survey of textbooks on group dynamics quickly reveals a wide diversity of meanings associated with the word 'group' (Cartwright and Zander 1968). For some theorists, it is the experience of common fate which is the critical factor (e.g. Campbell 1958; Lewin 1948; Rabbie and Horwitz 1988). Thus, we can say that Jews in Nazi Europe constituted a group because of their common (and tragic) fate of stigmatisation, imprisonment, and extermination. For other thinkers, the existence of some formal or implicit social structure, usually in the form of status and role relationships, is key (e.g. Sherif and Sherif 1969). The family is a good example here: we can regard the family as a group because its members have very well-defined relationships with one another (as parent, child, sibling, etc.), and these relationships usually carry with them clear power and status differences. However, a third school of thought suggests that these structural relations come about because of a still more elementary feature of groups - the fact that they consist of people in face-to-face interaction with one another (e.g. Bales 1950). And, of course, this is a characteristic of many of the groups we belong to - our family, our work group, and a host of others.

The second and third types of definition only really seem applicable to small groups (say, of 20 members or less) and would seem to exclude large-scale social categories such as ethnic groups (as in the example of the Jews cited previously), social class, or nationality. And yet, as we shall see in later chapters, these larger category memberships can influence people's behaviour just as surely as the smallest face-to-face group. This problem has led some writers to propose a more subjective definition of the group in terms of people's self-categorisations (Tajfel 1981; Turner 1982). According to this view, a group exists when,

two or more individuals . perceive themselves to be members of the same social category.

(Turner 1982, p. 15)

Thus, to return to our first example, Jews constitute a group because a significant number of people say to themselves 'I am a Jew'. The value of this characterisation is its simplicity and its inclusiveness, and for these reasons, it is the definition we shall adopt in this book. It is difficult to imagine a group in which its members did not at some stage mentally classify themselves as actually belonging to it, and the definition also encompasses the smallest unit (a dyad) as well as larger social categories like ethnic groups or nations.

That said, it is worth noting that, for most practical purposes, a purely subjectivist conception of a group might miss an important feature of most real-world groups - that their existence is typically known to others (Merton 1957). A central theme of this book is that we need to consider groups not just in their own right but also in relation to other groups. Thus, although Turner's definition will serve us well, we would emphasise that an additional factor in many group contexts is also the extent to which that group is visible to or recognised by other groups. This becomes important for some marginalised or stigmatised groups (e.g. sexual minorities) who may face a struggle to persuade the majority to accept their existence.

The Individual-Group Relationship

Before we can begin investigating the properties of groups and their effects, there is an important issue which must be discussed first.1 This concerns the nature of the relationship of the individual to the group - what Allport (1962) described as social psychology's 'master problem'. To put it at its simplest, the question is this: is there more to groups than the sum of the individuals that comprise them?

Allport himself was in no doubt about the answer. In one of the earliest social psychology texts, he wrote

There is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals.

(Allport 1924, p. 4)

The thrust of this often-quoted remark was aimed at some of his contemporaries who held that groups had some mental properties over and above the consciousness of the individuals which make them up. Thus, Le Bon (1896) and McDougall (1920) both talked of a crowd possessing a 'group mind' which led it to perform deeds which would be considered unthinkable by the individual crowd members on their own. We shall return to the topic of crowd behaviour later in the book (Chapter 6), but, for the moment, let us consider Allport's argument against this 'group mind' thesis. Allport's main point was that a term like the 'group mind' could not be independently verified; it was not possible to touch or observe this entity which was supposed to possess consciousness, apart from the individuals that comprised it.

In this, he was surely right: to talk of a group having a 'mind of its own' does seem to be an unfortunate lapse into metaphysics. However, in rejecting the idea of a 'group mind', Allport wanted to go further and dispose of the concept of the group altogether. Although in his later writings (e.g. Allport 1962) he appeared to modify his position somewhat, at heart he was still a strict individualist, believing that group phenomena could ultimately be reduced to individual psychological processes.

This reductionist view has not gone unchallenged, however. Others have argued that a rejection of the 'group mind' fallacy does not imply that we should abandon the study of group processes in their own right. Beginning with Mead (1934), and followed by Sherif (1936), Asch (1952), and Lewin (1952), these thinkers all insisted on the reality of social groups, believing them to have unique properties which emerge out of the network of relations between the individual members. This idea was nicely expressed by Asch (1952) with a chemical analogy. A substance like water, he argued, is made up of the elements hydrogen and oxygen and yet has very different properties from either constituent. Furthermore, these same molecular constituents when differently organised or structured produce substances with quite different characteristics (e.g. ice, water, steam). Thus, in a real sense, the compound H2O is not the simple aggregate of its constituents but is crucially affected by their arrangement. So, too, with human compounds, or groups:

We need a way of understanding group process that retains the prime reality of individual and group, the two permanent poles of all social processes. We need to see group forces arising out of the actions of individuals and individuals whose actions are a function of the group forces that they themselves (or others) have brought into existence.

(Asch 1952, p. 251)

For both Asch and Sherif, the reality of groups emerges out of people's common perceptions of themselves as members of the same social unit and in various relations to one another within that unit. Associated with these perceptions are various group products such as slogans, norms, and values, and these, too, can become internalised and hence serve to guide people's behaviour. For these reasons, it is possible to accept...