Large community Small contribution

Psychology of the group, and how to manage it.

In this post, I wanted to discuss the issue of small contribution in large communities. Normally larger communities achieve far more than small ones, but individual contribution in a large community tend to be smaller. Instead of trying to come up with ways to motivate community members, I wanted to look deeper into the group psychology and suggested ways to tackle the issue from an elementary perspective.

When trying to understand this phenomenon, it looked very similar to the bystander effect, which is when there is a call for support, individuals are less likely to reply when they are in a group; the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that one of them will act. Let’s discuss the three elementary effects and how we may counteract them in a community project …

Diffusion of responsibility

The most famous explanation for bystander effect is the diffusion of responsibility, that says: The individual assumes that others either are responsible for taking action or have already done so. This is well studied for cases of danger, and its was found that the best thing to do to counteract this effect is, to publicly call out just one person from the group and to give very specific instructions, that individual will most likely respond since all the responsibility falls upon him/her, once one bystander respond the group will follow and more and more people will take action.

In a community contribution scenario, the equivalent of this would be being very specific about what contribution is needed, and let everyone in the community know who is responsible for that contribution.

2. Herd mentality

The herd mentality is another explanation of the bystander effect, it says: people can be influenced by the group to adopt certain behaviors based on emotions. Each one of the group may make different decisions when they are alone. Studies showed that we can go as far as not trusting our senses in order to agree with the general emotion of the group.

For a community project, this can work both for and against the success of the project, it is critical to test and set the general mood before asking for support. when starting with positive general emotion, this effect will make easier for more people to contribute to the project, in a level that is matching the initial contribution.

3. Social facilitation and social loafing

The community is much more complex than a group of bystanders, this psychological effect is more present in a bonded group of people. It says, each individual most dominant response is mostly to occur. This is very different than the earlier two as it is polarizing the group members, because each individual will be affected differently depending on their competence. The presence of others will likely improve the performance of someone who find the task simple, but hinder the performance of members who find the same task difficult.

This is most of the time accompanied with the next effect: In a group effort, individuals can become more reliant on others to do the job, they may see that their contribution is unessential to success. which create a negative mood in the group and lead in general to poor performance overall.

The best solution for this is create an individual evaluation system. It will help everyone think outside the psychological effects of the group. If it is very hard to do like in the case of a community project, it is better to split the tasks into different difficulties elements and setting the contribution as a chain, where each individual has their own piece to work on, making each essential to success of the group.

Group size vs opinion harmony

Although it appears that the above phenomenons are strongly linked to the size of the group, there is a trade-of between group size and overall group members opinion harmony. To take advantage of the group psychology as a leader, besides understanding and countering the negative group effects, you always need to make sure that the group members are aligned toward the same goal and in agreement with approach. This becomes harder to maintain when the group size get larger, because this dilute the connection between members, which makes a way for the individual thinking to take over.

Great leaders can make a large group feel small, by keeping personal relationship with members and having consistency in interaction with members, unifying everyone around one simple idea, and addressing the differences issues between members very quickly.

Lastly, focusing on the personal relationships in the community. We are more likely to follow some one we know and respect than some one we don’t even though we agree with the idea. Physical proximity is interestingly found to influence the likelihood to be followed. This works both for the leader and the community members and between members themselves.

WHERE this article was originally published ?

https://eyenbros.com/messages/content_thread/d27df907-0e6c-43ff-8d38-b8ed5243d0b7/