title: Incipient Social Groups: An Analysis via In-Vivo Behavioral Tracking.
abstract: Social psychology is fundamentally the study of individuals in groups, yet there remain basic unanswered questions about group formation, structure, and change. We argue that the problem is methodological. Until recently, there was no way to track who was interacting with whom with anything approximating valid resolution and scale. In the current study we describe a new method that applies recent advances in image-based tracking to study incipient group formation and evolution with experimental precision and control. In this method, which we term "in vivo behavioral tracking," we track individuals' movements with a high definition video camera mounted atop a large field laboratory. We report results of an initial study that quantifies the composition, structure, and size of the incipient groups. We also apply in-vivo spatial tracking to study participants' tendency to cooperate as a function of their embeddedness in those crowds. We find that participants form groups of seven on average, are more likely to approach others of similar attractiveness and (to a lesser extent) gender, and that participants' gender and attractiveness are both associated with their proximity to the spatial center of groups (such that women and attractive individuals are more likely than men and unattractive individuals to end up in the center of their groups). Furthermore, participants' proximity to others early in the study predicted the effort they exerted in a subsequent cooperative task, suggesting that submergence in a crowd may predict social loafing. We conclude that in vivo behavioral tracking is a uniquely powerful new tool for answering longstanding, fundamental questions about group dynamics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Jamin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Halberstadt
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Joshua Conrad
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Jackson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bilkey
authors.affiliation: Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom.|Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Jong
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Harvey
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Whitehouse
authors.affiliation: Animation Research Limited, Dunedin, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Craig
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: McNaughton
authors.affiliation: Animation Research Limited, Dunedin, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zollmann
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003441:Crowding / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior; D055815:Young Adult