Groups and War Lab

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Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Military Influence Tactics: Lessons Learned in Iraq and Afghanistan
    (American Psychological Association, 2013-09-09) Wolfe, Andrea L.; Arrow, Holly
    When deployed U.S. soldiers attempt to influence the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors of civilians, success can save lives and failure can be deadly. Survey data from 228 military personnel with deployment experience to Iraq and Afghanistan revealed that in a challenging wartime environment, empathy, respect, prior relationships, and familiarity with influence targets predicted success in cross-cultural influence attempts. Influence techniques involving resources and positive feelings were used more commonly in relatively successful influence attempts; negative tactics were used more commonly in unsuccessful attempts.
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    Relationships and the social brain: Integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives
    (Wiley, 2012) Sutcliffe, Alistair; Dunbar, Robin; Binder, Jens; Arrow, Holly
    Psychological studies of relationships tend to focus on specific types of close personal relationships (romantic, parent–offspring, friendship) and examine characteristics of both the individuals and the dyad. This paper looks more broadly at the wider range of relationships that constitute an individual’s personal social world. Recent work on the composition of personal social networks suggests that they consist of a series of layers that differ in the quality and quantity of relationships involved. Each layer increases relationship numbers by an approximate multiple of 3 (5–15-50–150) but decreasing levels of intimacy (strong, medium, and weak ties) and frequency of interaction. To account for these regularities, we draw on both social and evolutionary psychology to argue that relationships at different layers serve different functions and have different cost-benefit profiles. At each layer, the benefits are asymptotic but the costs of maintaining a relationship at that level (most obviously, the time that has to be invested in servicing it) are roughly linear with the number of relationships. The trade-off between costs and benefits at a given level, and across the different types of demands and resources typical of different levels, gives rise to a distribution of social effort that generates and maintains a hierarchy of layered sets of relationships within social networks. We suggest that, psychologically, these trade-offs are related to the level of trust in a relationship, and that this is itself a function of the time invested in the relationship.
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    The Effect of Feeling Stereotyped on Social Power and Inhibition
    (SAGE Publications, 2011) Cook, Jonathan E.; Arrow, Holly; Malle, Bertram F.
    An experience sampling study examined the degree to which feeling stereotyped predicts feelings of low power and inhibition among stigmatized and nonstigmatized individuals. For 7 days, participants with a concealable (gay and lesbian), a visible (African American), or no identifiable stigma recorded feelings of being stereotyped, of powerlessness, and of inhibition immediately following social interactions. For members of all three groups, feeling stereotyped was associated with more inhibition, and this relation was partially mediated by feeling low in power. Although stigmatized participants reported feeling stereotyped more often than nonstigmatized participants, they reacted less strongly to the experience, consistent with the presence of buffering mechanisms developed by those living with stigma. African Americans appeared to buffer the impact of feeling stereotyped more effectively than gay and lesbian participants, an effect that was partly attributable to African Americans’ higher identity centrality.
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    Reengineering Gender: Relations in Modern Militaries: An Evolutionary Perspective
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2011) Hannagan, Rebecca J.; Arrow, Holly
    This article presents an evolutionary framework for understanding the sexual assault of women in the military. We specify the evolutionary underpinnings of tensions among heterosexual males, among heterosexual females, and between males and females and discuss how these tensions have played out in the strongly gendered context of warrior culture. In the absence of cultural interventions that take into account deep-seated conceptions of women in the military as unwelcome intruders, sexual resources for military men, or both, military women operate in an environment in which sexual assault may be deployed to enact and defend traditional military structures. We discuss how unit norms are likely to affect the choice of strategies by men and by women and how the resulting behaviors—including celibacy, consensual sex, and sexual assault—should affect horizontal and vertical unit cohesion. The framework is intended to guide future data collection in theoretically coherent ways and to inform the framing and enforcement of policies regarding both consensual and non-consensual sex among military personnel.
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    Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion: An Overview and Synthesis
    (Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 2010) Smith, Zachary; Arrow, Holly
    Religion is a cultural universal that has puzzled evolutionists since Darwin. The moral, social, emotional, and explanatory components that make up complex religious systems offer both evolutionary benefits and costs. Evolutionists who propose functional accounts of religion argue that it offers adaptive benefits that outweigh the costs. Theorists who propose nonfunctional accounts view religion as a byproduct of interactions among nonreligious cognitive adaptations and environments. Others argue that religion evolved via memetic transmission, which allows maladaptive features to persist. These maladaptive features may be anachronisms that were functional in the past but are detrimental to fitness in modern contexts. A thorough review reveals that work guided by these different perspectives is driven by divergent research questions that ultimately complement one another to offer a more comprehensive evolutionary account of the complexity, variety, and durability of religious belief and behavior.
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    Ancestral War and the Evolutionary Origins of "Heroism"
    (University of Chicago Press, 2007-11) Smirnov, Oleg; Arrow, Holly; Kennett, Douglas J.; Orbell, John
    Primatological and archeological evidence along with anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies indicate that lethal between-group violence may have been sufficiently frequent during our ancestral past to have shaped our evolved behavioral repertoire. Two simulations explore the possibility that heroism (risking one’s life fighting for the group) evolved as a specialized form of altruism in response to war.We show that war selects strongly for heroism but only weakly for a domain-general altruistic propensity that promotes both heroism and other privately costly, group-benefiting behaviors. A complementary analytical model shows that domain-specific heroism should evolve more readily when groups are small and mortality in defeated groups is high, features that are plausibly characteristic of our collective ancestral past.
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    The Sharp End of Altruism
    (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2007-10-26) Arrow, Holly
    Simulations show that war drives the joint evolution of altruism and hostility to outsiders.
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    "Social Poker": A Laboratory test of Predictions form Club Theory
    (SAGE Publications, 2004) Crosson, Scott, 1970-; Orbell, John; Arrow, Holly
    The theory of clubs addresses the gap between purely private and purely public goods, being concerned with how groups (‘clubs’) form to provide themselves with goods that are available to their membership, but from which others (non-members) can be excluded. Despite 35 years of formal development, there have been virtually no laboratory studies of club formation. We develop the ‘social poker’ laboratory paradigm toward filling this gap, and test the predictions from club theory that populations will partition into a privately and socially optimal set of clubs. The experiment included three conditions: (1) ‘Single shot’ with one trial of club formation; (2) ‘iterated’ with a sequence of four trials; and (3) ‘iterated dollar-guarantee’, with four trials in which participants who were not included in clubs still earned a small amount of money. In all conditions, clubs were frequently larger than was privately or collectively optimal; in the second condition, clubs were increasingly likely to include unnecessary members across trials. After clubs formed, members had the opportunity to ‘overclaim’ – to take more than their agreed-upon share of the club good. Although the incidence of overclaiming was low, it was more common in larger clubs, further reducing the collective earnings of participants.
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    A Tripartite Model of Group Identification: Theory and Measurement
    (SAGE Publications, 1999-10-05) Henry, Kelly Bouas; Arrow, Holly; Carini, Barbara
    Group identification is defined as member identification with an interacting group and is distinguished conceptually from social identity, cohesion, and common fate. Group identification is proposed to have three sources: cognitive (social categorization), affective (interpersonal attraction), and behavioral (interdependence). Inconsistent use of the term and problematic measurement mar existing literature on group identity and group identification. A new group identification scale, composed of three subscales that match the tripartite model for the cognitive, affective, and behavioral sources, is presented and its psychometric properties described.
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    Stability, Bistability, and Instability in Small Group Influence Patterns
    (American Psychological Association, 1997) Arrow, Holly
    Three models of change and continuity in group structure are tested using existing longitudinal data on 20 small groups. Groups met face to face or via a computer-mediated communication system for 13 weeks. Computer-mediated groups fit the robust equilibrium pattern best, with initial fluctuations in the influence hierarchy followed by a more stable structure that persisted despite changes in operating conditions. Face-to-face groups fit a bistable punctuated equilibrium pattern best, retaining their initial influence structure until an environmental cue triggered a shift. Contrary to die predictions of this model for radical change, adjustments were modest. Poor performance on tasks failed to trigger changes predicted by the adaptive response model, probably because outcomes were not very important to group members.
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    Membership Matters: How Members Change and Continuity Affect Small Group Structure, Process, and Performance
    (SAGE Publications, 1993-08-03) Arrow, Holly; McGrath, Joseph E.
    A framework for integrating diverse aspects of membership dynamics is outlined, and 10 propositions about membership change and its impact on group structure, process, and performance are presented. Data from a longitudinal study of 22 small (3- to 5-person) groups are used to test some of the propositions. Groups that had an experimentally imposed temporary member (a "guest") and groups with spontaneous membership changes, such as absences, performed better on a task requiring reflection about the group's internal processes than did groups with a stable membership. No such effect was found for performance on other types of tasks. Some evidence was found for higher cohesiveness among groups with changing attendance compared to groups with greater week-to-week stability. However, groups with a history of member change felt less positive about their groups when a guest replaced a regular member than did more stable groups. Groups with guests reported spending more time on task and less time dealing with conflict than did groups with no guests. Similar effects were found for groups meeting face-to-face and via computers. Implications for work groups and other types of small groups are discussed.