Social Interaction

An examination of Hare's findings about groups, teams, and social interaction, this book shows how these findings can be placed in the context of several theories, and discusses some applications that can be constructed for the analysis of various kinds of social situations. Part I brings together the literature on small workgroups from laboratory studies by social psychologists and practitioners in organizational development. Part II presents four theories of social interaction with examples of applications: functional, dramaturgical, exchange, and SYMLOG. The final chapter brings together features of these theories in a category system for the observation of groups.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the social-psychological literature on social interaction in small groups. Part I covers the influence of the physical situation, personalities, and social characteristics of the group members on the dynamics of the group. Part II covers the effect of the presence of others on pressures to conform experienced by group members. Part III includes chapters on roles, relationships, and leadership. Part IV reviews verbal and nonverbal communication, group decision making, and choice shift. Part V deals with cooperation, competition, and conflict resolution. Part VI discusses two types of external influence on the small group: the influence exerted by a larger group of which the smaller group is part, and the influence exerted by other groups with which the small group cooperates or competes.

Within psychology, emotion is often treated as something private and personal. In contrast, this book tries to understand emotion from the 'outside' by examining the everyday social settings in which it operates. Three levels of social influence are considered in decreasing order of inclusiveness, starting with the surrounding culture and subculture, moving on to the more delimited organization or group, and finally focusing on the interpersonal setting. At all these levels, emotion is influenced by social factors and has an impact on the way social life proceeds. For example, there are no direct equivalents in many cultures for some of the particular forms of emotion experienced in Western societies, suggesting that not all aspects of emotion are universal or biologically determined. Further, our various social identifications and allegiances partly determine what is emotionally relevant in a situation and how we respond to ingroup and outgroup members' emotions. Finally, emotions are usually occasioned by things that other people say, do, or have done to them, and often change the way interaction with those others proceeds. The book provides a critical review of existing theory and research on these topics from a social psychological perspective, and develops its own distinctive approach by recontextualising emotion in an integrated cultural, organisational and relational world.