During the 1950s, the landmark Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that when groups must compete with one another, intergroup conflict, hostility, and even violence may result. At the Oklahoman summer camp, two troops of boys—termed the Rattlers and the Eagles—took part in a week-long tournament. During this time, their negativity culminated in derogatory name-calling, fistfights, and even vandalism and destruction of property. However, this work also revealed that such tension could be...

Deindividuation is a form of social influence on an individual’s behavior such that the individual engages in unusual or non-normal behavior while in a group setting. Why? Because in these group settings, the individual no longer sees themselves as an individual anymore, disinhibiting their behavior and personal restraint.

Social traps are negative situations where people get caught in a direction or relationship that later proves to be unpleasant, with no easy way to back out of or avoid. The concept was orignally introduced by John Platt who applied psychology to Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons", where in New England herd owners could let their cattle graze in the common ground. This situation seems like a good idea, but an individual could have an advantage. If they owned more cows, the larger...

When in group settings, we are often influenced by the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors around us. Groupthink is another phenomenon of conformity where modification of the opinions of members in a group aligns with what they believe is the group consensus (Janis, 1972). In such situations, the group often takes action that individuals would not perform outside the group setting because groups make more extreme decisions than individuals do. Moreover, groupthink can hinder opposing trains of...

Avoidance-avoidance conflict refers to a psychological situation where a person must choose between two or more unpleasant alternatives. These conflicts are particularly stressful because neither option is desirable. This dilemma is often expressed in sayings like "caught between a rock and a hard place" or "between the devil and the deep blue sea." For instance, individuals who fear dental procedures may find themselves torn between enduring a painful toothache or facing the anxiety of...

The escape velocity of an object is defined as the minimum initial velocity that it requires to escape the surface of another object to which it is gravitationally bound and never to return. For example, what would be the minimum velocity at which a satellite should be launched from the Earth's surface such that it just escapes the Earth's gravitational field?
To calculate the escape velocity, it is assumed that no energy is lost to any frictional forces. In practice, a satellite launched from...