Ringelmann Effect

The Ringelmann effect is a systematic reduction of individual effort on a task as the number of people performing the task increases. The effect, named after Maximilien Ringelmann, who first reported it in 1913, was described in 1927 by Walther Moede in a German journal on industrial psychology. According to Moede, Ringelmann found that when groups of coworkers pulled on a rope, their collective group performance was inferior to the sum of their abilities to pull it individually. Furthermore, as a group increased in size from one to eight members, the discrepancy between the group's potential and its actual performance increased progressively. Assuming that men pulling a rope individually perform at 100% of their ability, Moede wrote that two-man groups perform at 93% of the ...