Groupies
Groups dominate our everyday lives and a UQ centre has emerged as a world leader in research on the psychology of group membership. Professor Michael Hogg, Director of UQ's internationally renowned Centre for Research on Group Processes, is interested in how people react to each other as part of a group, and how groups react to other groups.
The study of relationships between groups - small ones such as a handful of people in a workplace or large ones such as an organisation, an ethnic community, a nation or a whole gender - is a dynamic branch of social psychology reinvigorating theory from the early 1980s onwards.
By six years ago creating one of only a handful of world centres dedicated to research on groups and identity, Professor Hogg and colleagues are members of an international elite of theorists making significant in-roads into our understanding of basic group processes in groups of all sizes.
The Centre regularly snares Australian Research Council (ARC) and other funding far exceeding the usual levels for the social and behavioural sciences.
Perhaps one of the reasons for funding bodies' enduring and increasing confidence in the Centre's research is its relevance to major issues facing humanity such as: prejudice and discrimination, war and peace, and organisational leadership.
"We spend a lot of our lives in groups whether these be at work, within families or socially. They dominate our lives. Groups can construct pyramids or unite people in a crisis, or they can commit gross evils such as genocide. In fact, it's impossible to imagine a complex society which does not rest on groups," Professor Hogg said.
The Centre is located within the School of Psychology. As well as producing dozens of books, journal articles and conference presentations each year, its staff of 13 academics organise and host a world-renowned annual symposium for the discussion of social identity research.
According to Professor Hogg, three current research themes running through the Centre are, leadership; environmental sustainability issues, and uncertainty and its contribution to the drive to join groups and perhaps the emergence of extremism.
"Leaders emerge out of groups you can't lead unless the group lets you," he said. "In the past, leadership theory has tended to concentrate on the personal attributes of leaders themselves rather than the process by which they emerge from a particular group. Good leaders are highly sensitive to where the group is at and engender a sense of being a part of the group. Good leaders require the trust of the group yet must remain slightly apart from it. Most past theories have neglected to explore this paradox."
He said his research on uncertainty revealed people often sought out groups because of an overwhelming uncertainty about themselves, the future and the world in general.
"They flock to tightly prescriptive groups such as cults or extremist political parties," he said.
"Our studies to date have shown reducing such peoples' self-conceptual uncertainty may be a key part of deterring this pressing need to belong to such extremist groups."
Research flowing from an ARC Linkage grant with the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines is just one example of group processes theory impacting on practice in this case, environmental sustainability.
"We're looking at the sorts of conditions under which people adopt environmentally sustainable practices," Professor Hogg said.
"We've found, for example, that while a lot of people in rural areas know about sustainable land practices, they sometimes fail to act because sustainability is an image inconsistent with rural identity. Many associate sustainability with hostile ?city folk? patronisingly telling them what to do.
"The research concerns a fundamental question for social psychologists the relationship between what people think, and what they actually do.
"What is underpinning our research is how can we get people who have the right attitudes to actually act out these attitudes as behaviour."
Various rural and regional Queensland communities will be targeted for this innovative approach, involving a series of workshops and interventions designed to develop a proud sense of rural identity oriented around 'intelligent custodianship' of the bush.
Research team
Leadership: Professor Michael Hogg
Uncertainty: Professor Michael Hogg, Professor Deborah Terry and Associate Professor Robin Martin
Sustainability: Professor Deborah Terry, Professor Michael Hogg, Dr Barbara Masser and Dr Prashant Bordia
Leadership: 1998-2000 ARC large grant ($120,559)
Uncertainty: 2001-2003 ARC large grant ($133,500)
2002-2004 ARC Discovery grant ($318,455)
Sustainability: 2001-2003 ARC SPIRT grant ($337,869)
mike@psy.uq.edu.au
Web link
www2.psy.uq.edu.au/research/CRGP/index.html
