Social Loafing

Many notable accomplishments in human history, from erecting the pyramids of Egypt to placing a man on the moon, required that people work as a group, combining their efforts toward a common goal. Yet a common feature of groups is social loafing—a reduction in motivation and effort when people pool their contributions. People tend to be less productive, generating less output when their efforts are combined than when they work individually. This entry summarizes current thinking on social loafing by describing it in the context of related phenomena, providing research illustrations, and reviewing causes of and solutions to social loafing.

[Page 709]Social loafing is a broad construct that includes the free rider effect and the sucker effect. The free rider effect refers to the decline in contributions observed when people perceive their contributions as redundant with the contributions of others. The sucker effect is the tendency for people to withhold contributions when they perceive or anticipate that other people are loafing at their expense. That is, people sometimes contribute less to avoid being exploited by others who are loafing. Social loafing is distinct from these other effects in that social loafing is a broader term referring to any reduction in effort or motivation when contributions are pooled. The free rider effect and the sucker effect are narrower terms that refer to specific causes of social loafing.

Researchers have documented social loafing in a variety of tasks, including clapping and cheering, swimming in a relay race, solving mazes, wrapping gum, pulling a tug-of-war rope, and generating uses for objects. In a typical study, groups of participants receive instructions to generate uses for an object (e.g., uses for a knife) and believe that their individual contributions are or are not identifiable. Participants reliably generate more uses when they believe the number of uses they generate can be identified by the experimenter than when they believe the uses cannot be identified.