Question

Think back to a time when you have had to work in a group for a class project. Provide an example of how the following concepts impacted the group: Social Facilitation, Social Loafing, Group Polarization, and Group Think.  

Answer 1

A time when during my course in college I had to work in a group for a class project for developing a drug on a novel target for multiple myeloma due to social facilitation when our team presented in front of the class the performance of each member of the team was better than when we were due mock presentations. Despite the fact that there was social loafing as the group was exerting less effort on a task when they were in a group versus when they worked alone as people got involved in socialization. Group polarization tendency was also present in our group as we made decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of our team. At several times we made decisions as a group, that resulted in typically unchallenged, poor-quality decision-making because we chose a target in the signal transduction pathway which was not pointed of control of various pathways. All this happened as our group was polarized and not open to suggestions. Despite all this, the final presentation came out well because of social facilitation as even while presenting I made a little bit of change in the content of my presentation due to the ideas that I got because of the questioning in between done by the audience.