What is a social group?

Every day we communicate and interact with many people. This happens all the time. Often, regardless of desire, we join various social groups. Basically, this happens completely unnoticeably, naturally and quickly.

What is a social group? It is a union of people, which has its inherent features. To such signs it is possible to carry interests, the purposes, values, a social status and so on.

Social group

The appearance of such groups is primarily due to the division of labor that took place many centuries ago. Each social group is based on the use of certain specific benefits of culture, society and so on.

The totality of such groups is the social structure of society. It is understood as an internal social order, ordered by the norms formed in the process of interaction of groups. Of course, it is the social structure that makes society something single, whole.

A social group is not the same as a quasigroup. In the second case, it is an unstable informal unification of people whose structure is implicit, and the goals are blurred or highly questionable.

Quasigroup is an audience, a crowd, a queue in a store and so on. Quasigroups are small groups. But at the same time, we should not forget that their participants simultaneously enter into other larger associations - into large social groups. Why does social psychology make a big accent precisely on the study of small associations of people? First of all, because they exert the strongest influence on the development of the human person. A large social group creates a certain basis, which in the future will develop in small groups.

A microgroup is an association of two or three people. The number of people increases - the social group becomes small. Both these associations can be both temporary and permanent. Why the queue in the store can be called a social group? The reason is that it is a collection of people who are in the same place at one time, as well as having the same goal. Of course, such a social group is temporary.

Every day we unite with many people. This applies to both home and work. A family is a social group, the collective at work is the same. Unions of people are different, their structure and purpose are always different. In any association, sooner or later the leader is singled out. Who is the leader? It is a person who, with the help of his authority, and not of any power, can influence people's behavior, their activities, decisions, and so on.

Members of small social groups are often in an unequal position. Often inequality is conditional.

In this article, we can not fail to mention the conformality. This term refers to the influence that a social group has on an individual. The fact is that there are certain rules and regulations that are mandatory for execution. Also, the group may be dominated by certain opinions on certain issues. A person who is a member of an association may agree with the group's opinion and the rules adopted by it or disagree. If he does not agree, the group in one way or another will try to force him to accept her values. The individual resists and does not want to obey? This is nonconformism, that is, independence from the majority opinion.

Social groups can have both negative and positive effects on people. Participation in some of them can have extremely harmful effects (for example, communication with drug addicts can lead to a person becoming a drug addict himself).