Individual-Group Continuity In Cooperation And Competition Under Varying Communication Conditions

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TERM PAPER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

INDIVIDUAL-GROUP CONTINUITY IN COOPERATION AND COMPETITION UNDER VARYING COMMUNICATION CONDITIONS


ABSTRACT
A 2 (Individuals / Groups) X 2 (Communication / No communication) ten-trial Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG) study examined effects of repeated communications on the so-called discontinuity effect: the observation that intergroup PDG interactions are more competitive than interindividual PDG interactions. Inconsistent with the discontinuity hypothesis, but consistent with goal-expectation theory, results indicated that repeated communications increased cooperation to an equal extent for individuals and groups; and that groups had stronger cooperative expectations of, and attributed less competitiveness to their opponent, than individuals. Findings suggest an individual-group continuity effect, rather than a discontinuity effect, within the context of repeated PDG interactions and communications between individuals and groups.
INTRODUCTION
Groups have a bad reputation, even leading to half-jokingly comments by some authors that ‘humans would do better without groups’ (Buys 1978). Once individuals are submerged in a group, they seem to transform from a Dr. Jekyll into a Mr. Hyde and are driven by the lowest impulses and instincts (LeBon 1895). Only as single individuals, they would act in a civilized, cool, calm, and collected way. In his discussion of mass phenomena, Brown (1954) described this discrepancy between individual and group behavior as an ‘apparent discontinuity’, suggesting that individuals submerged in groups are more antisocial, domineering, deceitful, hostile, aggressive and competitive compared to isolated individuals.
In their program of research on this ‘individual-group discontinuity hypothesis’ -the name was borrowed from Brown's (1954) discussion- Insko, Schopler, and colleagues give strong evidence for the negative image of the social group sketched above...