Social Loafing

History and Background

The motivational effects of groups on individuals have long been of interest to social and organizational psychologists. In perhaps the earliest social-psychological studies, conducted in the 1880s, Max Ringelmann designed a rope-pulling apparatus that allowed him to measure the strain exerted both by individuals and by groups of varying sizes. When he asked male volunteers to pull on a rope, either alone or in groups ranging in size from two to six people, he found that as group size got larger, the total force exerted was progressively lower than would be predicted from the simple addition of individual efforts. This raised the possibility that collective tasks could reduce the motivation of individuals, though the performance reduction in these studies could also have been due to process loss, or poor coordination of the efforts of individual group members.

Nearly a century later, in 1974, Alan Ingham and colleagues designed a paradigm that sought to separate motivation loss from process loss. Individuals were asked to pull on a rope either alone or in groups of varying sizes across a number of trials. However, on some of these trials, when individuals believed they were pulling with others, they were actually pulling alone. The deception was masked with the use of confederates and by having participants wear blindfolds. Ingham and colleagues replicated the performance reductions with increasing group size found by Ringelmann and also showed that reductions occurred both on actual trials (in which participants really pulled with others) and on pseudogroup trials (in which they pulled alone but believed they were pulling with others). The latter finding suggested that working in groups can reduce individual motivation.

To control for mere presence, distraction, and evaluation concerns that can vary with changes in group size, social loafing researchers usually compare individual performance on a collective task (in which members' inputs are combined into a group total) with individual performance on a coactive task (in which individuals work in the presence of others but their inputs are counted individually), while keeping group size the same [Page 809]across these two conditions. As in the research by Ingham and colleagues, pseudogroups are often employed to allow researchers to study individual performance on tasks in which the individuals simply believe their outputs are being combined into a group product.

A seminal study by Bibb Latané and colleagues in 1979 nicely illustrates these features. Participants were asked to shout as loudly as possible, both alone and with others. Participants were asked to wear blindfolds and headphones that played masking noise that prevented individuals from hearing whether others were shouting. Participants shouted in both actual groups and pseudogroups, in which they were told they were shouting with others but actually shouted alone. Individual efforts were still reduced on these pseudogroup trials, showing that a significant percentage of the reduced performance on group tasks was due to reduced motivation, as distinct from coordination loss. Latané and colleagues were also the first to use the term social loafing to describe the tendency of individuals to reduce their efforts on group tasks.

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