5 - From Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back, Social Pressures in Informal Groups

Summary

Festinger, Schachter, and Back’s Social Pressures in Informal Groups (henceforward FSB’s SPIG) was one of the most exciting and theoretically generative works in what we now think of as the field of social networks, emerging from one of the focal arenas of Gestalt-psychology-inspired research. It established the importance of functional distance for relationship formation, and demonstrated that there were effects of variations on the scale of feet, not miles. It also used a clever research design to attempt to see if information spread along social networks. The clarity of FSB’s structuralist vision was to some degree clouded by the then-common reification of groups, and a tendency to focus on normative and functional goals to the exclusion of all else. Yet here were many of the seeds of the structural approach to social networks.