Groups
“The world is too much with us,” the great British poet William Wordsworth once
complained. He believed that immersion in the world kept us from the divine realm
of nature. But sociologists are more likely to side with John Donne: “No man is an
island, entire of itself.. .”
Even by yourself, sociologists believe, you are “in society.” Brought up within
culture, the very ideas you carry around about who you are and what you think and
feel—these are already conditioned and shaped by society. It is our experience in
society that makes us human.
Apart from individuals, then, the smallest unit of society is a group. To sociologists,
agroupis any assortment of people who share (or believe that they share) the same
norms, values, and expectations And the smallest group is a dyad,a group of two. Any-
time you meet with another person, you are in a group. And every time the configura-
tion of people meeting changes, the group changes. Two different classes may have the
same professor, the same subject matter, and most of the same students, but they com-
prise different groups, and they are often completely different environments. Groups can
be formal organizations, with well-defined rules and procedures, or they may be infor-
mal, like friends, co-workers, or whoever happens to be hanging around at that moment.
A group can be very small, such as your immediate family and friends, or very large,
such as your religion or nation, but the most significant groups in our lives are the ones
so large that we don’t personally know everyone, but small enough so we can feel that
we play an important role in them: not your occupation, but your specific place of busi-
ness; not all skateboarders in the world, but your specific skateboarding club.
Passengers on the airplane or the customers in a restaurant are not a group.
Strictly speaking, they are a crowd,an aggregate of individuals who happen to be
together but experience themselves as essentially independent. But the moment some-
thing goes wrong—the flight is cancelled or the service is inexplicably slow—they will
start looking to each other for validation and emotional support, and chances are they
will become a group. On the TV series Lost, an airplane crashes on a mysterious island
in the South Pacific, and the survivors band together to fight a series of weird super-
natural threats. On the airplane, they had been reading, napping, or staring into space,
basically ignoring each other, but now they are becoming a group.
Groups differ from crowds in their group cohesion,the degree to which the indi-
vidual members identify with each other and with the group. In a group with high
cohesion, individual members will be more likely to follow the rules and less likely
to drop out or defect to another group. Because every group, from business offices
to religious cults to online newsgroups, wants to decrease deviance and keep the mem-
bers from leaving, studies about how to increase cohesion have proliferated. It’s not
hard to do: You need to shift the group importance from second place to first place,
transforming the office or cult into “a family,” by forcing members to spend time
together and make emotional connections. Wilderness retreats and “trust exercises”
are meant to jump-start this connection. And you need to find a common enemy, a
rival group or a scapegoat, someone for the group members to draw together to fight.
The survivors on Losthave little to do but establish emotional intimacy, and they have
a common enemy, the mysterious Others from the other side of the island.
Groups and Identity
Everyone belongs to many different groups: families, friends, co-workers, classmates,
churches, clubs, organizations, plus less tangible groups. Are you a fan of blues music?
GROUPS 81