The one thing that most of us really despise is working in groups, right? If you experience this feeling, it is likely because of a phenomenon called “Social Loafing”.
Social loafing refers to the concept that people are prone to exert less effort on a task if they are in a group versus when they work alone. The idea of working in groups is typically seen as a way to improve the accomplishment of a task by pooling the skills and talents of the individuals in that group. But, in some groups, there is a tendency on the part of the participants to contribute less to the group’s goal than if they were doing the same task themselves. In other words, all of the group members typically assume that someone else will do the work.
An extensive amount of research has been conducted on social loafing. In 1913 Maximilian Ringelmann conducted an experiment on horses! After his experiment, he concluded that the power of two animals pulling a coach did not equal twice the power of a single horse. He did a similar experiment on Humans called as “the rope pulling experiment” in which he found out that when he asked a group of men to pull on a rope, that they did not pull as hard collectively as they did when each was pulling alone.
In contrast with Ringelmann’s first findings, Bibb Latané et al. replicated previous social loafing findings while demonstrating that the decreased performance of groups was attributable to reduced individual effort, as distinct from a deterioration due to coordination. They showed this by blindfolding male college students while making them wear headphones that masked all noise. They then asked them to shout both in actual groups and pseudo-groups in which they shouted alone but believed they were shouting with others. When subjects believed one other person was shouting, they shouted 82% as intensely as they did alone, but with five others, their effort decreased to 74%.
Latané et al. concluded that increasing the number of people in a group diminished the relative social pressure on each person.
