In this chapter, we examine the implications of interpersonal influences for issues that occur in small groups that are (a) homophilous with respect to a particular sociodemographic characteristic, (b) assembled in a large-scale population, and (c) disjoint in their memberships. These groups are “small” (n = 2, 3, 4, …, 12, … 20, … 100, …, 1,000, …) relative to the size of the population in which they are assembled. We treat these groups as disjoint influence systems with respect to a particular issue (Section 1.3.3), which need not involve direct interpersonal influences or contacts between all pairs of members. The empirical analysis that we present in this chapter addresses the implications of interpersonal influences within small same-sex (i.e., gender-homophilous) groups of dyads, triads, and tetrads for the distribution of issue positions in the population of individuals in which these small groups are embedded.

We focus on a circumstance in which individuals of the same sex randomly assemble into disjoint groups (i.e., groups with no overlapping memberships), enter into their groups with independently formed positions on an issue, proceed to discuss the issue with other members of their groups, and terminate their discussion of an issue after some period of time with either a modified or unmodified position on the issue. Such a set of circumstances describes a common experimental design for the study of small group social processes. These designs have typically been employed to investigate hypotheses concerned with within-group phenomena and, thus far, we have concentrated on such phenomena.