InterindividualIntergroup Discontinuity

Historical Background

The question of whether individuals are prone to behave in a more hostile, competitive, and aggressive manner when banded together in a group can be traced through centuries of intellectual history. Plato placed his faith in the rule of an enlightened individual (the Philosopher King) rather than in democracy because he believed that democracy offers power to irrational mobs. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay expressed a similar wariness of groups in the political arena. They were particularly concerned with safeguarding the rights of political minorities and placing checks on the power of majorities.

In a similar vein, the first systematic treatises of group psychology, formulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, proposed that people assembled in a group are apt to act more instinctively, more primitively, and more destructively than are isolated individuals. Gustave LeBon, for example, argued that because people behave differently in groups than they do in isolation, they are clearly caught in the sway of a crowd mind—a mental entity that takes possession of group members. Floyd Allport is well known among social scientists for his critique of this crowd-mind concept. Nevertheless, in his later writings, Allport referred to the difference between individual and group behavior as the master problem of social psychology.

Much work has since focused on comparing the task performance of individuals and groups, as illustrated by research on social facilitation, individual versus group problem solving, social loafing, and brainstorming. However, when the goal of research is to determine whether groups are more hostile, competitive, and aggressive than individuals, the most useful comparison does not involve the isolated individual and the isolated group. Rather, the appropriate test involves a contrast between interindividual interactions and intergroup interactions. Research on interindividualintergroup discontinuity has examined this contrast in laboratory and nonlaboratory settings, both of which are discussed in this entry.

Laboratory Evidence

Most of the laboratory research has structured the social interaction with the use of the prisoner's dilemma game (PDG). With the PDG, each of two players, A and B, has two choices, X and Y, yielding a total of four possible choice combinations. Each choice combination yields a unique set of payoffs or outcomes for the two players. If both A and B select X, they both receive a moderate payoff, say $3. If, on the other hand, one player selects Y while the other player selects X, the player who chose Y, whether A or B, may receive $4 and the other player may receive only $1. Finally, if both players select Y, they may both receive $2.

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