Midterm Corrections

I got question 33 wrong: Which advantage of groups involves members of groups being more willing to doing things outside their comfort zone because they are "all in it together"?

I answered with letter d. which said that greater commitment on the decision reached was an advantage of group work. I thought that if everyone truly was "all in it together" and each person had an effect on the decision making process of the group, that maybe as answer d stated, each person would be more tied down to the decision.

This was incorrect. The correct answer was b. the Risky-shift phenomena. The Risk-shift phenomena states that contrary to popular belief, when in the safety of a group, people are more likely to make riskier decisions. This occurs because when one is acting alone, there is rarely more than that one person alone to blame. When entrenched in a group, at least there are other people to share the blame. In addition, as the overall success of the group goes up, so does the riskiness taken in their decisions.

For a real life example of this I need to look no further than high school. A combination of being seniors in high school in their last few months of school, going to an all-male high school, and being forced to wear a shirt, dress pants, dress shoes, and blazer had built up the need to rebel in my class of seniors. We decided that if we all acted as one, no one could possibly punish every single one of us. So we decided to show up to school in costumes, most of them being fairly inappropriate. Not because it was Halloween or some other holiday, but for the simple fact that we knew if everyone did it, there would be no blame, or at least relatively little blame spread around.