Browsing by Author "Titlestad, Kim."

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Moral behaviour and the formation of social identity in minimal virtual environment.
(2015) Taylor, Simone.; Durrheim, Kevin Locksley.; Titlestad, Kim.
Social media has become a popular medium for social interaction. Behavior on these mediums has gained researchers attention due to their unorthodox, immoral forms of behavior. By providing a primitive virtual environment whereby participants can create their own meaning and constructs to a game, it can provide insight into the reasons for their emerging behaviors. The minimal group studies provide a platform whereby participants can engage in a virtual world, and through which contrast their own meaning to a simplistic game. Through their attached meaning, they express a formation of identity, and an emergence of new forms of behaviors. Although such emerging behavior is displayed in other contexts such as crowds, recent theories have developed extending to specifically virtually interaction. The SIDE model argues that anonymity enhances social identity and identity performance in interaction, inducing anti-normative behaviors to emerge. This study aims to examine the participant‟s constructs of the minimal game and through which determining if their emerging behaviour is due to a loss of identity or an evolving social identity as the SIDE model indicates. This study uses a qualitative, social constructionist design as it will enable the analysis of the social construction of the participants interaction in the game and allow for the understandings and insights of how they develop meaningful experiences Although useful, this method is limited as it can only draw emphasis on the participants construction, and their expression of what occurred in the game. The results indicate that the participants constructed the game by attaching meaning to their surround environment. They linked the context of the game to politics, money and social dynamic. Further the results indicate that within the individual condition they constructed that their behaviour was dependant on the context, and therefore justified. In the group context, there was a greater inclination to perception that all behaviour should benefit the group. This however, was contested by groups members stating that behaviour was circumstantial driven, and there were situations in which behaviour toward the group should not be expected. Ultimately, both aspects of the SIDE model, cognitive and strategic, were evident in the data. The anonymity of virtual worlds evoked the individuals into a greater emergence of social identity leading a new forms of behaviour as well as provides protection from judgement allowing for strategic behaviour is emerge.
Re-imagining possibilities for minimal groups : extending the two-group paradigm.
(2014) Titlestad, Kim.; Quayle, Michael Frank.
By stripping the social setting of many of its key features – including social interaction – the minimal group studies aimed to discover the basic conditions under which ingroup bias would occur. The studies found that group categorisation was sufficient for the development of ingroup favouritism and outgroup discrimination. This key finding led to the development of the social identity perspective – a theory of intergroup behaviour which is highly influential in social psychology. However, the minimal group studies were only conducted in a two-group setting, reflecting a general emphasis on dichotomous intergroup settings in social psychology. Furthermore, the removal of interaction from the social setting, in the pursuit of experimental control, reflects a view of human beings as passive conformers rather than active agents in the development of social norms. The aim of this research was to extend the minimal group paradigm in order to study a multigroup setting that reaches beyond the two-group group paradigm that has dominated traditional research. In particular, the inclusion of a third group illuminated the role of a middle status group which has been largely ignored. Second, by allowing social interaction, which is usually excluded due to lack of experimental control, the role of human agency and creativity in the formation of norms could be studied. It was found that it was within the middle status group that the strength of ingroup bias begins to weaken as group members strategically attempt to manage their position in the middle. Furthermore, particular behavioural trends accelerated or decelerated over time as they gained or lost momentum. While ingroup bias slowed over time for the middle status group, outward giving to the high status group increased. This finding exemplifies the two-way interaction between the social environment and the social actors within this environment. Finally, an unexpected outcome of this research was the divergence between the psychological experience and social reality in such a way that an intergroup alliance between the low and high status group (when a middle status group was included) was reported when in fact the exact opposite was true.