# Week 5 -- Social Behavior and Social Influence (II)
## Motivating Questions
- Why do we behave differently in different groups?
- Why are relationships important?

## Social Needs :busts_in_silhouette:
2 theories of humans' social needs:

## Key Constructs of Group Dynamics
### Social Facilitation (Mere Presence Effect)
- People do better on simple tasks and worse on complex tasks, when they are in the presence of others and their individual performance can be evaluated.

- e.g. In a bicycle race, when racing with someone, you will tend to perform better vs. cycling by yourself.
- Explanation for how office space design impacts on performance
- Digital workplace -- social facilitation effects are just as salient in online as f2f environments
- Creating the perception of presence and proximity of co-works

### Social Loafing
- People do worse on simple tasks but better on complex tasks when they are in the presence of others and their individual performance cannot be evaluated.
- e.g. Rope pulling experiment shows the more people there are pulling the rope, the less strength they exert
- Physical vs Digital Workplace/Learning
- Gender Balance (women expressed less social loafing than men across cultures, since women tend to be more relational) :face_with_hand_over_mouth:
- Collectivists vs Individualistic thinking. People who are more individualistic tend to be more susceptible to social loafing.
- Group think :thought_balloon: -- the desire of harmony in the decision-making process where group unity is emphasized over critical thinking.
- Group polarization -- Groups tend to make more extreme decisions than the individual. If you're neutral and the rest of the group are leaning towards one of the views, you'll be inclined to just follow the group to lean towards that particular view.
- e.g. social media platforms (especially Twitter) tend to foster group polarization, since like-minded people will strengthen the group identity and different-minded people reinforce a split in affiliation.


### Interpersonal Relationships
- Proximity
- Functional distance
- "If I didn’t have you, I’d probably be able to find someone else … if that person is close enough"
- 
- Familiarity
- Mere Exposure Effect (The stock purchase exercise!): If you're exposed to something, you'd have preference towards that thing.
- Repetition: The more often you're exposed to something, the higher your preference is towards that thing
- Similarity
- The matching hypothesis (people say opposites attract, but turns out it's more likely for people to be attracted to each other if they have similarities/common likes)
- Reciprocity
- Types of Friendship
- Workplace Friendships
- Internet Friendships

Social Network
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Social network: An organized set of relationships that an individual or group has with others
- Types and methods of communication (offline vs online)
- Patterns of liking and disliking
- Strengths of interpersonal connections
Social network analysis: A set of empirical procedures for studying the relational structure of networks
- Nodes (circles): Individuals in groups/networks
- Edges (lines): Connections between each other
- Indexes: Network size, network density, transitivity, etc.

Importance of Relationships
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### Social Support
- Perceived
- Received
- Quantity/Quality? How big a network can we handle?