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Reference groups provide the benchmarks and contrast needed for comparison and evaluation of group and personal characteristics. Robert K. Merton hypothesized that individuals compare themselves with reference groups of people who occupy the social role to which the individual aspires. [10] [11]
A social group exhibits some degree of social cohesion and is more than a simple collection or aggregate of individuals, such as people waiting at a bus stop, or people waiting in a line. Characteristics shared by members of a group may include interests, values, representations, ethnic or social background, and kinship ties.
As a group gets larger, adding another person has less effect on its characteristics. A consideration at least in smaller groups, though, is whether the number of members is even or odd. Doing things together is easy if all those involved agree on what to do, or if majority opinion is able to override objections without repelling the objectors.
An even stronger constraint is verbal subgroup, which is the image of a fully invariant subgroup of a free group under a homomorphism. More generally, any verbal subgroup is always fully characteristic. For any reduced free group, and, in particular, for any free group, the converse also holds: every fully characteristic subgroup is verbal.
Group dynamics is a system of behaviors and psychological processes occurring within a social group (intragroup dynamics), or between social groups (intergroup dynamics). The study of group dynamics can be useful in understanding decision-making behaviour, tracking the spread of diseases in society, creating effective therapy techniques, and ...
[66] [44] For more entitative groups, social perceivers are more likely to overestimate the role of group characteristics in shaping individual behavior while disregarding external influences. [44] [67] [60] Another significant outcome of perceiving a group as entitative is the reduced attribution of mind to individual group members. Mind ...
Group cohesiveness, also called group cohesion, social harmony or social cohesion, is the degree or strength of bonds linking members of a social group to one another and to the group as a whole. [1] Although cohesion is a multi-faceted process, it can be broken down into four main components: social relations , task relations, perceived unity ...
A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country , village , town , or neighborhood ) or in virtual space through ...