There was a study conducted in which videotaped interviews of married couples were examined and the emotions displayed during those interviews were listed and ranked. The couples were followed and after 15 years, the conductor found out whether they were still married. The emotions displayed were broken down into twenty emotions. The single greatest emotion that had the most statistically significant relationship with whether the couple stayed together or not? Contempt. Contempt being defined as "trying to put that person on a lower plane than you. It's hierarchial." (Blink, Gladwell) In some settings, we also call this pride. The amount that contempt is displayed is more closely linked with divorce than any other emotion measured. And the study is 95% accurate in its predictions. My question is this: If contempt is the most closely related to failed relationships in the most personal of relationships, husband and wife, then is contempt also the most closely linked with failed group relationships?

I have been working with sociograms for a few months now and have been trying to create better questions that will get at the heart of whether the group relationship will flourish or fail. Do I need to find a way to measure how hierachial the group dynamics are and whether or not individuals in the group feel like they are valued equally? Will this turn out to be the greatest influence on group relationship success? Sociograms are often used to identify outliers, or loners. To do that one might ask each group member, "How well do you know...?" And if you add everything together and find out that no one in the group knows a certain individual, then you have a loner on your hand. You can also find the opposite. This tells us something about the individual, but does it really tell us if the group relationship is flourishing? How would I go about measuring that? I don't want to ask, "Do you think you're better than...?" or "Does...think they are better than you?" simply because it is focusing on the negative and somewhat encouraging those types of thoughts. Maybe we should ask "How much does...treat you as an equal?" We might have to try this out on a class and just see what the results are. I know, it's not scientific, completely without hypothesis, but it's good enough for now.