Social Influence and Group Processes

This is the seventh and last chapter of NCERT's Class 12 Psychology textbook (pages 120–131 of the 2026-27 reprint). It covers the nature and formation of groups (with Box 7.1 on groupthink), types of groups (with Box 7.2 on Tajfel's minimal group experiments), and the influence of the group on individual behaviour — social loafing and group polarisation. It has three activities, one figure (two drawings), five review questions and one project idea. It is a short chapter: despite the title, the reprint has no sections on conformity, compliance, obedience, cooperation and competition, social identity or intergroup conflict, and social facilitation gets one sentence. Two marked Beyond-NCERT sections below supply the essentials, so the page has seven NCERT sections and two Beyond-NCERT ones rather than padded material.

• Builds on the live Class 12 chapter Attitude and Social Cognition (norms and reference groups, ingroup bias, contact and the reduction of prejudice — NCERT there says social identity and intergroup conflict follow in this chapter), Self and Personality (self-esteem and social identity), and the Class 11 chapters What is Psychology? (social psychology as a field), Methods of Enquiry (the ethics of Asch's and Milgram's studies) and Thinking (decision-making and groupthink). The sociology chapter Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology (Class 11) treats primary and secondary groups, ingroups and reference groups from the sociologist's side.
• UPSC: the GS4 syllabus names ‘social influence and persuasion’ under attitude, and GS4 case studies constantly involve teams, committees, peer pressure and group decisions. UPSC has asked how social influence and persuasion could make Swachh Bharat succeed (2016), set an essay on thinking needing an ‘opposite team’ (2023) — the groupthink argument — and set a case on two communities in conflict whose rivalry had seeped into the local administration (2026) — ingroup and outgroup. Conformity versus integrity, obedience versus conscience and groupthink in governance are standard GS4 answer themes, though conformity and obedience are now Beyond NCERT.

• Group = an organised system of two or more people who interact, are interdependent, share motives, and have roles and norms. Not groups: crowd (chance, no structure), audience (purpose, passive), mob (purpose, polarised attention, impulsive). Team = complementary skills + mutual accountability + synergy.
• People join for security, status, self-esteem, psychological and social needs, goal achievement, knowledge. Groups form through proximity, similarity, common motives and goals.
• Tuckman: forming → storming → norming → performing → adjourning — but groups may skip, repeat or overlap stages. Structure: roles, norms (‘unspoken rules’), status (ascribed or achieved), cohesiveness (‘we feeling’).
• Groupthink (Irving Janis, Box 7.1): a cohesive, homogeneous, isolated group seeks unanimity over realistic appraisal — the US escalation in Vietnam (1964–67). Remedies: reward dissent, alternatives, outside experts, trusted feedback.
• Types: primary/secondary, formal/informal, ingroup/outgroup (‘we’ and ‘they’). Tajfel's minimal group paradigm (Box 7.2): boys grouped by liking Klee or Kandinsky still favoured their own group. NCERT: categories are made by us; India has a plural, composite culture.
• Social loafing (Latané): less effort per person as group size grows — 5 causes, 5 remedies (make efforts identifiable). Group polarisation: discussion hardens a group's initial lean — new arguments, bandwagon, ingroup identity. Beyond NCERT: facilitation (Triplett, Zajonc), Asch, Milgram, Sherif, Tajfel–Turner.

NCERT contrasts your family, class or playgroup with people who happen to be in one place — at a cricket match or a school function. The latter are not interdependent, have no defined roles or status and expect nothing of one another. A group is therefore defined as an organised system of two or more individuals who interact, are interdependent, have common motives, a set of role relationships and norms that regulate members' behaviour. NCERT then lists its features: members see themselves as belonging (which gives the group its identity); they share motives and goals (working towards a goal or away from a threat); they are interdependent — a fielder's dropped catch affects the whole team; they influence each other while satisfying needs together; they interact directly or indirectly; and their interaction is structured by roles and norms, so members perform the same functions each time the group meets.

Other collections. A crowd gathers by chance — people collecting at a road accident — with no structure, no belongingness and no interdependence; NCERT describes crowd behaviour as irrational. An audience assembles for a purpose, such as a match or a film, and is generally passive, but may work itself into a frenzy and become a mob, which has a definite sense of purpose, polarised attention, action in one direction, and homogeneous, impulsive thought and behaviour. A team is a special kind of group: complementary skills, commitment to a common purpose, mutual accountability and positive synergy from coordinated effort. In groups, performance depends on individual contributions and the leader holds responsibility; in teams, both individual contribution and teamwork matter, and members hold themselves responsible even though there is a leader.

We belong to several groups at once because different groups meet different needs, which can create competing demands that we usually manage. NCERT lists six reasons for joining: security (being with others gives comfort and protection, so we feel stronger and less vulnerable); status (membership of a group others value brings recognition and a sense of power — the pride of a school that wins an inter-school debate); self-esteem (feelings of self-worth and a positive social identity; prestigious groups lift the self-concept); psychological and social needs (belonging, giving and receiving attention, love and power); goal achievement (goals one cannot reach alone — ‘there is power in the majority’); and knowledge and information that supplement what an individual knows.

Group formation needs contact and interaction, helped by three conditions. Proximity: repeated interaction with the same people in a colony, school or playground lets us learn their interests and attitudes. Similarity: exposure lets us assess similarities, and we like similar people for two reasons NCERT gives — people prefer consistency in relationships (two football lovers), and similar people validate our opinions and values (someone who also thinks too much television is harmful). Common motives and goals: NCERT's example is a student who wants to teach children in a slum who cannot go to school, cannot do it alone, and forms a group of like-minded friends to do it.

Groups develop; one does not become a member the moment people come together. NCERT notes that groups usually pass through formation, conflict, stabilisation, performance and dismissal, and gives Tuckman's five-stage sequence. Forming: great uncertainty about the group, its goal and how to reach it; members get to know each other and judge whether they fit, with excitement and apprehension. Storming: intragroup conflict over how to reach the target, who controls the group and its resources, and who does what; at its end a leadership hierarchy and a clear vision emerge. Norming: norms of group behaviour develop, giving a positive group identity. Performing: the structure has evolved and is accepted, and the group works towards its goal — the last stage for some groups. Adjourning: for groups like a school function's organising committee, the group disbands once the task is over. NCERT adds that groups do not always move in this order: stages may run together, groups may go back and forth, or skip some.

As members interact, group structure develops: regularities in the distribution of tasks, responsibilities and the relative status of members. NCERT names four elements. Roles are socially defined expectations that people in a given situation are expected to fulfil — as a son or daughter, one is expected to respect and listen to elders and be responsible about studies (role expectations). Norms are expected standards of behaviour and belief that members establish, agree on and enforce — a group's ‘unspoken rules’ and shared ways of seeing the world. Status is the relative social position others give a member, ascribed (for example by seniority) or achieved (by expertise or hard work); we gain status from high-status groups, and within a group the cricket captain has more status than other players though all matter. Cohesiveness is togetherness or mutual attraction — team spirit, the ‘we feeling’: members of highly cohesive groups think, feel and act as a unit, want to stay, and find it hard to leave, while outsiders find it hard to get in. But extreme cohesiveness can work against the group, through groupthink.

Groups differ in size (a country or a family), duration (a committee or a religious group), and organisation (the army or police versus spectators at a match). NCERT gives three pairs. Primary and secondary groups: primary groups are pre-existing formations usually given to the individual — NCERT names family, caste and religion — while secondary groups are joined by choice, such as a political party. Primary groups have face-to-face interaction, close physical proximity and warm emotional bonds, are central to a person's functioning and shape values and ideals early in life; their boundaries are less permeable, since one cannot choose membership. Secondary-group relationships are more impersonal, indirect and infrequent, and it is easy to leave and join another. Formal and informal groups differ in how explicitly the group's functions and roles are stated: a formal group, such as an office or a university, is formed on specific rules or laws, with definite roles and norms that establish order; an informal group is not based on rules or laws and has close relationships among members.

Ingroup and outgroup. As individuals compare themselves with others, they compare their own group with groups they do not belong to. The ingroup is one's own group (‘we’), the outgroup another (‘they’). Using ‘we’ and ‘they’ categorises people as similar or different; ingroup members are generally seen as similar, viewed favourably and credited with desirable traits, while outgroup members are often seen negatively. NCERT adds that these categories are not real but created by us, and that in some cultures plurality is celebrated, as in India's composite culture, reflected in the lives people live and in art, architecture and music.

NCERT says groups influence individual behaviour and promises two situations: performing alone in the presence of others (social facilitation) and performing with others as part of a group (social loafing). Facilitation gets only one sentence: research suggests the presence of others causes arousal, which can improve performance if a person is already good at the task, when efforts are individually evaluated.

Social loafing is the reduction in individual effort on a collective task — one where outputs are pooled. Tug-of-war is the example: no one can tell how much force each member exerts, so members can relax and become free riders. NCERT describes experiments by Latané and associates, who asked male students to clap or cheer as loudly as possible, saying they wanted to know how much noise people make in social settings; participants were alone or in groups of two, four or six. The total noise rose with group size, but the noise per person fell: each put in less effort as the group grew. NCERT's five causes: members feel less responsible for the whole task; motivation falls because contributions are not individually evaluated; the group's performance is not compared with other groups; coordination is poor or absent; and belonging is unimportant — the group is a mere aggregate. Five remedies: make each person's effort identifiable; raise the pressure to work hard by building commitment; raise the task's apparent importance; make people feel their individual contribution matters; and strengthen cohesiveness.

Important decisions — whether to set up a school in a village, say — are often taken by groups. Besides groupthink, groups show group polarisation: they are more likely than individuals to take extreme decisions. NCERT's example: colleagues deciding the punishment for an employee caught taking a bribe may let her or him off entirely or recommend dismissal, rather than a punishment proportionate to the act. Whatever the initial position, it becomes much stronger through discussion — the strengthening of a group's initial position as a result of interaction and discussion — which can have dangerous consequences when groups swing from very weak to very strong decisions.

NCERT explains why with a discussion among like-minded people on capital punishment, giving three reasons. (1) New arguments: in like-minded company one hears fresh arguments for one's own side. (2) A bandwagon effect: seeing others hold the view makes it feel validated by the public. (3) Ingroup identification: one comes to see like-minded people as an ingroup, identifies with it, conforms, and the view hardens. (This page takes no position on capital punishment; NCERT uses it only as a topic on which people hold strong views.)

Conformity is changing behaviour or belief to match a group's norm. Muzafer Sherif (1935) showed norms forming: in a dark room a still point of light seems to move (the autokinetic effect), and people judging the movement together converged on a shared estimate that they kept when later tested alone. Solomon Asch (first reported 1951) used an unambiguous task: which of three lines matches a standard line? Seated with confederates who, on critical trials, all gave the same wrong answer, participants went along with the group on roughly a third of those trials, and about three in four conformed at least once — though most answers stayed correct. Conformity fell sharply when one other person dissented, and when answers were given privately. Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard (1955) distinguished informational influence (others are taken as evidence of what is right, as in Sherif's task) from normative influence (going along to be accepted, as in Asch's).

Compliance is doing what someone asks, whether or not one agrees privately. Classic techniques include the foot-in-the-door (a small request first makes a larger one more likely — Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, 1966), the door-in-the-face (a large request that is refused makes a smaller follow-up more likely — Robert Cialdini and colleagues, 1975) and the low-ball (agreement is secured, then the terms are made worse — Cialdini and colleagues, 1978). Herbert Kelman (1958) separated compliance (for reward or to avoid punishment), identification (to be like a liked source) and internalisation (the idea fits one's own values) — see Chapter 6.

Obedience is following the orders of an authority. In Stanley Milgram's study (published 1963), 40 men recruited in New Haven were told it was a study of punishment and learning and asked to give a ‘learner’ — in fact a confederate, who received no shocks — increasingly strong shocks for each error, on a generator with 30 switches from 15 to 450 volts. Prompted by an experimenter, 26 of the 40 (65%) went on to the final 450-volt switch, and none stopped before 300 volts. In later variations obedience dropped when the victim was closer, when the experimenter gave orders by telephone, and when other ‘teachers’ refused. Diana Baumrind (1964) criticised the study's deception and the stress it caused; the debate is set out on the live Methods of Enquiry page.

Cooperation and competition. Morton Deutsch (1949) distinguished situations where people's goals are linked positively (one person's success helps others — cooperation) from those where they are linked negatively (one's success is another's failure — competition); cooperative goal structures tend to bring more communication, trust and coordination. Muzafer Sherif's Robbers Cave study (1954) put boys of about eleven or twelve at a summer camp in Oklahoma into two groups that first bonded separately, then competed in a tournament with prizes — which produced name-calling, raids and strong ingroup bias. Simply bringing them together for meals and films did not reduce the hostility; superordinate goals that neither group could reach alone, such as restoring the camp's water supply, did.

Social identity. Building on the minimal group experiments, Henri Tajfel and John Turner (1979) proposed social identity theory: part of the self-concept comes from group memberships, so people seek a positive distinctiveness for their groups — through categorisation (us and them), identification with the ingroup, and comparison with outgroups. This explains ingroup favouritism even where nothing material is at stake, and links to NCERT's point that groups provide self-esteem and a positive social identity (Section 2).

The chapter has three activities, one project idea and a reflective question in the Introduction. Short outlines follow. Class exercises should respect classmates' feelings; ratings and opinions can be kept anonymous.

The five review questions at the end of the chapter (page 130). Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Being in one place does not make people a group; interdependence, roles and norms do.
• A team is a special group whose members hold themselves accountable.
• Proximity, similarity and common goals bring people together.
• Groups pass through forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning — not always in order.
• Norms are a group's unspoken rules.
• Status can be ascribed or achieved.
• Cohesiveness is the ‘we feeling’; extreme cohesiveness invites groupthink.
• Groupthink puts unanimity above realistic appraisal.
• Primary groups are given; secondary groups are chosen.
• A trivial basis for grouping is enough for ingroup favouritism (Box 7.2).
• Social loafing happens when individual effort cannot be seen.
• Make effort identifiable to reduce loafing.
• Group discussion strengthens a group's initial position.
• One dissenter sharply reduces conformity (Asch, Beyond NCERT).
• Superordinate goals reduce intergroup hostility (Sherif, Beyond NCERT).

Traps to avoid

• A team is a kind of group, not its opposite.
• Storming comes before norming.
• Groupthink comes from extreme cohesiveness, not conflict.
• Ascribed status is given; achieved status is earned.
• Primary = given (family); secondary = chosen (a political party).
• In Box 7.2 the groups were formed on preference for Klee or Kandinsky, a trivial basis.
• Latané: total noise rose; noise per person fell.
• Facilitation = in front of others; loafing = with others on a pooled task.
• Group polarisation strengthens the initial lean; it is not a split into two camps.
• Polarisation can make a group more lenient as well as more severe.
• Box 7.1's 56,000 American deaths: the usual figure is about 58,000.
• Conformity, obedience, social identity theory and intergroup conflict are not in the current reprint.
• Asch: about a third of critical-trial answers conformed, not a third of people.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• No Prelims question in the bank is taught here. Likely future items: Tuckman's stages in order; the four elements of group structure; groupthink's conditions and remedies; Box 7.2's minimal group paradigm (Tajfel; Klee and Kandinsky); social loafing versus social facilitation; group polarisation versus groupthink; and Beyond-NCERT researcher matches (Janis–groupthink, Latané–loafing, Triplett and Zajonc–facilitation, Asch–conformity, Milgram–obedience, Sherif–Robbers Cave, Tajfel and Turner–social identity).

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS4 — social influence and persuasion: 2016 asked how social influence and persuasion could make Swachh Bharat succeed. Chapter 6 gives the persuasion toolkit; this chapter adds the group side — community norms and cohesiveness, reference to the ingroup's pride (status, self-esteem), and the cure for social loafing on a shared task like keeping a locality clean: make each household's or ward's effort identifiable, compare wards, make each contribution feel valued. The weakest of the links kept.
• Essay — dissent and good decisions: the 2023 essay ‘Thinking is like a game, it does not begin unless there is an opposite team’ draws on Box 7.1: cohesive, isolated groups that silence dissent decide badly (the Vietnam escalation), and the remedies are institutionalised opposition — critical thinking, alternatives, outside experts, feedback. Group polarisation adds that like-minded discussion hardens positions.
• GS4 — communities in conflict: the 2026 Rajapuram case, where inter-community rivalry had seeped into the administration and police, calls on ingroup–outgroup categorisation and Box 7.2's lesson that favouritism needs very little to start; NCERT's note that categories are made by us and that plurality can be celebrated; and, Beyond NCERT, superordinate goals and cooperative contact. Present options without a verdict; Chapter 6 supplies prejudice and its reduction.
• Practice themes without a linked question: crisis of conscience (2013, 2019) and conscience versus rules (2023) are best answered with obedience and conformity research (Section 8), which is Beyond NCERT, so those questions are not linked here. Teamwork, committee decisions and collective accountability recur in GS4 case studies — use the group–team contrast, Tuckman, groupthink remedies and loafing remedies.
• Answer frame: define the group process (group, team, norm, groupthink, loafing, polarisation) → NCERT's mechanism and example → why it matters in administration → remedies from the chapter (dissent, identifiability, cohesion, outside review, proportionality) → a Beyond-NCERT study if it adds force (Asch, Milgram, Sherif) → one-line conclusion.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.