Social Interdependence and the Promotion of Cooperative Learning
Social interdependence theory has provided a conceptual framework to understand cooperation and competition through a common mechanism: Social interdependence, i.e., the mechanism whereby the outcomes of individuals in a group are affected by the actions
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Social Interdependence and the Promotion of Cooperative Learning Fabrizio Butera and Céline Buchs
Contents Introduction
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Social Interdependence
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Psychological Processes in Social Interdependence
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Cooperation
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Cooperative Learning Methods
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Positive Interdependence and Social Comparison Inspiring and Threatening Partners Competence Threat
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The Promotion of Cooperative Methods
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Recommended Reading
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Guiding Answers to Questions in the Chapter 123 References
F. Butera (*) University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] C. Buchs University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
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Introduction We have all observed, at school, in professional settings and in sports, that some groups work in harmony, with members coordinating their actions and helping each other. Other groups, however, experience a great deal of antagonism, with members favoring their own interest and acting against each other. What explains such differences? How can the functioning of a group be predicted and possibly oriented? At an individual level of analysis, group members may have different—sometimes compatible, sometimes conflicting—personal orientations, and be more pro-social or pro-self, thereby favoring joint or self-serving outcomes (De Cremer & Van Lange, 2001). Group members may also hold mixed motives in a given situation, as a function of their focus on the task at hand as well as the social relations in the group (De Dreu, Nijstad, & van Knippenberg, 2008). Classmates, for instance, may be motivated to discover the correct solution to a problem in a physics lab class, and at the same time motivated to show their own competence to the teacher. An individual level of analysis requires a strong reliance on group composition to predict how groups will behave (Moreland & Levine, 1992). Groups, however, possess particular properties that are likely to influence group members’ behavior over and beyond their
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 K. Sassenberg, M. L. W. Vliek (eds.), Social Psychology in Action, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13788-5_8
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F. Butera and C. Buchs
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personal orientation. One such property— imposed by the environment or inherited by the group’s history—is goal structure that is the set of a group’s rules, norms, or practices that specify and influence the type of interdependence among individual goals (Johnson & Johnson, 2005). Social interdependence theory posits that interdependence may be positive and lead to interactions that facilitate the attainment of all group members’ goals, or negative and lead to interactions that favor one’s goal attainment by hindering the goal attainment of other group members (Deutsch, 1949). For example, in the famous Robbers Cave study (Sherif, 1958), children in a summer camp discovered that the truck with the day’s food was stuck, and could only be rescued if all the children pulled it in synchrony. The situation created a common goal (retrieve the
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