What turns a queue at a bus stop into an actual group
People waiting together at a bus stop share a place and a purpose, yet sociologists do not call them a group. A group needs members who interact, share traits and feel some unity. Oddly, experiments show that sorting strangers into random categories can be enough to make them start favouring their own side.
Social scientists define a social group as two or more people who interact, have characteristics in common and sense themselves as a unit. Shared traits may include interests, values, background or kinship, meaning ties of ancestry, marriage or adoption. Groups range in scale up to whole societies, and the processes within and between them are called group dynamics.
Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif proposed a stricter test in 1956. A true social unit needs accepted roles, settled status relationships, agreed norms and sanctions of praise or punishment when those norms are kept or broken. Early studies of urban street gangs from the 1920s through the 1950s fitted this frame, seeing gangs as reactions to authority built around defending territory and maintaining internal rank.
A rival view, the social identity perspective, argues that membership is mainly a matter of perception. Evidence comes from the minimal group paradigm, in which people assigned to openly arbitrary categories still favour their own category even when they gain nothing personally. Self-categorization theory later took up the question of how people come to see themselves as group members at all.
Donelson Forsyth sorts groups into four kinds. Primary groups are small, lasting and tightly bonded, shaping attitudes and values through constant face-to-face contact. Social groups, such as coworkers or a study circle, are also small but last a moderate time, and outsiders can join fairly easily. Collectives, like bystanders or an audience, form briefly and dissolve. Categories, based on shared ethnicity, gender, religion or nationality, are usually the largest. Robert Bales divided group activity into relationship interactions, from support to criticism, and task interactions aimed at shared goals. Groups also differ in interdependence: a sports team relies on each member far more than a cinema crowd does. Outsiders often talk of a group as one entity, as when the band played beautifully, an impression researchers call entitativity.
Source: Social group
