The article is based on the book «Social Psychology» by David Myers.
If a team of 8 people competes in tug-of-war, will their total effort be equal to the sum of the efforts of 8 people participating in the individual championship?
Almost 100 years ago, the French engineer Max Ringelmann proved that the collective effort in such a team is 2 times less than the sum of individual efforts. Later, researchers led by Alan Ingham measured the effort when pulling the rope and found that the effort that the participant applied when he knew for sure that he was pulling the rope alone was 18% higher than the effort that he applied, thinking that there was someone standing behind him and pulling rope other test subjects. This phenomenon has been called «social laziness».
Bibb Latane, Kipling Williams, and Stephen Harkins noticed that 6 people shouting or cheering «with all their might» made not 6 times more noise than one person, but only less than 3 times. As with tug-of-war, «noise production» is also affected by group inefficiencies.
Latane conducted his experiments in the following way: six blindfolded subjects were seated in a semicircle and given earphones through which deafening screams or applause were broadcast. At the same time, the participants could not hear either their own or other people’s cries and applause. Depending on the scenario of the experiment, they were asked to shout or applaud, either alone or with others. Previously, the participants in the experiment suggested that together with others they would shout louder, as they would feel more relaxed. What actually turned out? Social laziness appeared: when the subjects thought that the other 5 members of the group were either shouting or clapping their hands, they made 3 times less noise than when they thought they were doing it alone. Strikingly, those who applauded, both alone and with the group, did not consider themselves lazy; it seemed to them that in both cases they «lay out» the same way. The same thing happens if students are working on a team project for which they will receive the same grades. Williams notes: the very fact of the existence of laziness is recognized by everyone, but no one wants to recognize himself as lazy.
In John Sweeney’s experiments, students pedaled bicycles more vigorously (their effort was judged by the amount of electricity they received) if they knew that the experimenters were observing each of them individually, and not when they thought that the total efforts of the entire team were being evaluated. . When a group works, its members are tempted to ride at the expense of their comrades, that is, to become «freeloaders».
In laboratory conditions, social loafing is manifested not only when subjects tug of war, pedal an exercise bike, shout or applaud, but also when they pump water or air, evaluate poems or editorials from newspapers, produce ideas, type on a computer or recognize signals.
That is, in cases where the remuneration for labor is divided equally, without taking into account individual contributions to the common work, any «freeloader» receives a greater reward (in terms of a unit of effort expended). People often work collectively, pooling their efforts, but if they do not bear personal responsibility for the results of their work, they tend to work not as hard as they do alone. These results are consistent with observations of real labor collectives: the absence of individual responsibility for the results of labor creates a fertile ground for manifestations of social laziness.
Manifestations of social loafing in real life
When the Communists were in power in Russia, work on collective farms was organized in such a way that today people worked in one field, tomorrow in another, and no one was responsible for anything. In personal use, they had only small plots of land. At the same time, personal subsidiary farms of collective farmers, which accounted for only 1% of all cultivated land, provided 27% of the country’s total agricultural output. In Hungary, only 13% of agricultural land was in personal use, but their share in the harvest was more than 30%. In China, when the authorities allowed peasants to sell the agricultural products that remained after settlements with the state, the annual growth in food production was 8%, and over the past 26 years, their annual production has increased by 2,5 times.