In which circumstance is social loafing most likely to occur?

Also referred to as the Ringelmann effect, social loafing was discovered by French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann while working on a rope pulling experiment in 1913. Ringelmann was interested in understanding how agricultural workers could maximize their productivity. During each round of tug-a-war, Ringelmann found that although groups of men pulling would outperform individual men overall, the total pulling force of each group did not equal to the sum of each individual’s maximum pull strength. In other words, each man in a group did not pull as hard collectively as they did when they were asked to pull alone. As well, he found that as more people were added to the group, the further below maximum capacity they would pull. This meant that, if each individual can pull a maximum of 100 units, a group of eight people would pull only 392 units, not 800.1

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Who is most likely to engage in social loafing?
What are examples of social loafing?
What increases social loafing?

Ringelmann attributed the source of his findings to two types of losses: coordination and motivation losses. He stated that coordination loss, or the “lack of simultaneity of their efforts,” was the primary cause of social loafing. He believed motivation loss, the belief that other group members will supply the remaining effort, occasionally made the lack of coordination worse.4

One of social loafing’s primary implications is the reduced performance in collaborative group efforts. Inspired by Ringelmann’s initial findings and attributed causes of social loafing, American Social Psychologist Bibb Latané and his colleagues studied noise production in groups versus alone in 1979, and confirmed this idea. Latané and his co-authors state that social loafing is a “disease,” in which the negative consequences affect individuals, social institutions, and societies. It leads to a decrease in human efficiency, lowering profits and thus lowering benefits for everyone.

The study goes on to discuss the causes of social loafing through the lens of the Social Impact Theory, which according to Latané, states that while the overall impact of others on a certain individual increase and the number of people increases, the rate of the increase in impact diminishes as each new person is added. According to Latané, social loafing is caused by three factors:

Attribution and Equity: The failure to assign and maintain an equitable workload division among group members. This is due to three factors, based on the physics and psychophysics of producing sound: individuals judging their own outputs as louder due to the relative proximity to others, sound cancellation in group settings, and misperceptions of the sound produced in a group. The study mentions that this leads individuals to think that other participants are less motivated or skillful than themselves, leading individuals to produce less sound because they felt there was no reason to work hard when those around them were shirkers or less competent.
Submaximal Goal Setting: Instead of maximizing the quality of work produced, participants put in enough effort to simply match the standard of what was expected of them. In social psychologist Ivan Dale Steiner’s words, the task was changed from a maximizing task to an optimizing task.
Lessened Contingency Between Input and Outcome: Participants felt a disconnect between the goal and what needed to be done to get there when performing in groups compared to individually. Since it is difficult to gauge individual efforts when performing in groups, people cannot receive appropriate credit or blame for their efforts.8

In a meta-analysis of 78 studies done by Psychologists Kipling Williams and Steven Karau in 1993, they proposed the idea of the Collective Effort Model (CEM), which hypothesized that working on a collective task will reduce motivation amongst group members due to lowered expectations of successful goal attainment and decrease in the subjective value of the goal.9 According to Williams and Karau, individual expectations for goal attainment tend to be low since it is difficult to predict the probability of success for an entire group compared to working alone. This study also found support for the idea that “loafing was greater among men than women, in Western countries compared to Eastern ones, and for simple tasks rather than complex ones.” 2, 10, 11

The definitions of social facilitation and social loafing might seem to contradict each other. Does the presence of others help performance (social facilitation) or hinder it (social loafing)? This discrepancy will be clearer once their definitions are clarified. Social loafing requires collaborative work: everyone present must strive to complete the same goal. Social facilitation, however, does not require collaborative work. Social facilitation simply requires others to be present — they don’t need to be working to reach the same goal.

In the same study done by Lantané and colleagues in 1979 discussed above (whose aim was to replicate Ringelmann’s 1913 experiment findings), Lanté and colleagues found that instead of the previously attributed reason for social loafing being lack of coordination as stated originally by Ringelmann, there was a reduction in individual efforts due to causes stated above (Attribution and Equity, Submaximal Goal Setting, and Lessened Contingency Between Input and Outcome). This does not discredit whether social loafing exists, but simply provides more reasons to explain its occurrence.

A study done by Williams and Karau in 1991 found support for the social compensation hypothesis, which states that people tend to work harder in group settings than individually when they expect their group member to perform poorly on an important task. They studied participants working either collectively or collaboratively on an idea generation task, with expectations of group member performance being inferred from participant interpersonal trust scores, direct manipulations from a confederate group member statement of intended effort, or their ability at the task.12

This contradicts the first attributed cause cited by Latané and colleagues in 1979 above, as this study argues that when group members are perceived to put in less effort, the individual will put in more effort to compensate. On the other hand, Latané and colleagues state that individuals will put in less effort because they believe there is no reason to put in a lot of effort when those around them were shirkers. Perhaps more research needs to be done in order to understand the circumstances under which social loafing and social compensation apply.

Can Workplace Friendship Reduce Social Loafing?

In a study done in Taiwan, researchers examined the relationship between workplace friendships and the effects of social loafing among employees in a Certified Public Accounting (CPA) firm. They found that there was a negative relationship between workplace friendship and social loafing effect among CPA employees. In other words, the closer a pair of CPA employees were, the less social loafing was observed, and thus more effort was put in on collective tasks involving both parties.13

Why Less Is More in Teams

A publication in the Harvard Business Review provides some food for thought by asking the reader why they think different sports have different specifications for the number of players that can play at once. It addresses the possible causes of social loafing and provides four options for how one can prevent social loafing when reducing group size is not an option: (1) dividing tasks in such a way so that each team member can be held accountable for a part of the overall goal, (2) creating a sense of urgency amongst members, (3) making weaker team members feel overly responsible for the underperformance of the team (which the author notes to be “unappetizing”), and (4) creating an environment that is transparent and open in terms of providing and receiving feedback.14

Social Loafing versus Elite Female Rowers

A 1995 publication from Anshel analyzes the effects of task duration and mood on elite female rowers. Arguably, rowing is particularly interesting in the context of social loafing as the task itself requires high-level coordination in order to reach the team’s highest performance capabilities.

As predicted, researchers found that social loafing did not occur when performing tasks alone. However, social loafing did not occur under the “short duration” condition and was only apparent when participants performed the task under relatively prolonged conditions. This contradicts the findings of previous research, as they have suggested that social loafing occurs when the task at hand is not personally interesting or holds important meaning and consequences to those involved.15 The most note-worthy finding for this particular study is that social loafing was an influence not only by the presence (or lack thereof) of other rowers or the amount of effort put into the task but also by the duration of the task. They offer a possible explanation to be that the longer the duration of the task, the harder it is to identify who may be slacking in effort.16

According to Kamau and Williams (1993), college students were the population most likely to engage in social loafing. Their study also found that women and participants from collectivistic cultures were less likely to engage in social loafing, explaining that their group orientation may account for this.

Social Loafing Examples. Tug of war, group homework projects, and an entertainer asking an audience to scream are all examples of social loafing because as you add more people to a group, the total group effort declines. Tug of War is the perfect example because it's where Maximillian Ringelmann originally found it.

Factors influencing social loafing include expectations of co-worker performance, task meaningfulness and culture. The Collective Effort Model (CEM) of social loafing holds that whether or not social loafing occurs depends on members' expectations for, and value of, the group's goal.