The Social Dimensions of a Twelve-Man Jury Table

Abstract

The term frequently used to delimit the interest of smallgroup research, has not usually been interpreted literally. If there are more than two persons in a group, it is not possible to seat them so that they are fully face-to-face, and if there are more than three persons, it is not possible to seat the group so that each member has equal visual accessibility to the remaining members. So long as the groups are relatively small the differential accessibility between positions is usually small, but it increases rapidly for groups larger than six seated at rectangular tables. For the conscientious hostess, the recognition that all positions are not equally accessible raises delicate social questions. Social rank must be recognized and, beyond this, the consequences to be promoted or avoided by accessibility or isolation must also be considered. For the student of small-group behavior, the differential accessibility between positions may have implications for research design, but even if this is not so, better knowledge of concomitants of position may increase the understanding of mechanisms involved in interpersonal communication. Four recent articles dealing with the importance of relative seating in discussion groups deserve specific mention in connection with the present report. Steinzor (12), working with a counseling class seated in a circle, reported that, after any given person stopped talking, persons directly opposite (and consequently, most distant) were most likely to speak next. From the position opposite the speaker to the position adjacent to the speaker, the speak-next probability declined. Steinzor concluded that the more nearly opposite one sits, the greater the physical and expressive stimulus value of a speaker. Unfortunately, Steinzor's method of analysis does not rule out the possibility that his results may have arisen simply because two high participators in his group tended to sit opposite one another. Bass and Klubeck (1), who were interested in relative participation as an indicator of leadership in groups seated in a V-formation, realized, as a result of Steinzor's study, that participation (or leadership) might involve a positional bias. They extrapolated from Steinzor's result the hypothesis that the person with the greatest mean seating distance from all the other partici1 The authors wish to acknowledge R. P. Abelson's helpful criticism of the version of this paper presented at the Midwestern Sociological Meeting in April, 1956 and for earlier discussions in 1951. More recently, Jack Sawyer, Anthony Kallet, and Robert Sommer have made helpful suggestions. This work is part of the Jury Project of the Law School, the University of Chicago, and this draft was completed while Fred L. Strodtbeck was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.