READING 8
Many Hands Make Light the Work: The Causes and Consequences of Social Loafing by Latané, Williams, & Harkins (1979)
Please refer to the printed reader, Readings in Social Psychology 3/e, for the text of this article.
Overview
One of the most fascinating things about group dynamics is that the group as a whole often is very different from the sum of its parts. In other words, how successful a group, or what policy it decides to implement, or how competitive it acts, can be quite different from what one would predict based on averaging the talents, attitudes, or dispositions of all the group members. This intriguing discrepancy is illustrated throughout Chapter 8 (Group Processes). One such discrepancy is demonstrated in this creative study by Latané, Williams, and Harkins (1979). Anyone who has worked on a group project or been part of a team is likely to recognize what these authors call social loafing—when the individuals working together in a group don’t produce as much or work as hard as they would if they were working individually. Note how the authors introduce their research by bringing together some seemingly contradictory findings from past research, and how they build their hypotheses in an attempt to understand and account for these contradictions. As you read this research, think about your own experiences with groups or teams and whether these experiences seem consistent with these results. How could you help prevent social loafing in your next group task?
Critical Thinking Questions
1. As discussed in Chapter 8, Zajonc’s model of social facilitation suggests that on an easy task such as yelling or clapping, the presence of spectators should lead to improved performance. But Latané and colleagues report that participants produced less noise on these tasks when in groups than when on their own. How can you reconcile this finding with social facilitation theory? What are the differences between this experimental situation and the settings used by Zajonc in his research?
2. Are the present findings consistent or inconsistent with research about the bystander effect in helping behavior (Chapter 10)? How so?
3. How do Latané et al. describe the difference between social loafing and coordination loss (or faulty coordination)? How are the researchers able to assess both concepts in Study 2?
4. The authors propose several possible causes of social loafing, one of which has to do with faulty attribution processes. How can attribution processes help explain why participants behaved the way they did in these studies?
5. Are there tasks that would be less susceptible to social loafing? That is, given the explanations provided by Latané et al. for why social loafing occurs, can you think of some types of tasks that should be immune to this “social disease?”
6. Social loafing could certainly occur in a classroom setting when students work on a group project. If you were a professor assigning a group project to your class, what specific steps would you take to prevent social loafing and why?
Answers to Critical Thinking Questions
1. The critical distinction between the tasks described in this research and those examined by Zajonc involves the issue of evaluation apprehension. In Zajonc’s studies, the presence of others led participants to experience evaluation apprehension as they worried about how they would be judged by others. This led to arousal, which facilitated a dominant response, producing increases in performance on an easy, familiar task. But in the Latané et al. studies, the presence of others does not lead to evaluation apprehension among participants. In fact, the presence of others in these studies leads participants to feel more anonymous because their relative contribution to the group is not as easily identifiable as it would be if they were on their own. This helps explain why in Zajonc’s model, the presence of others leads to improved performance on an easy task, but in the present studies it leads to a decrease in performance. Whether or not the presence of others leads to evaluation apprehension determines whether social facilitation or social loafing occurs.
2. The present findings have some clear overlap with Chapter 10’s discussion of the bystander effect. Perhaps this should not be surprising given that Latané was involved in both sets of studies! Chapter 10 explains how the presence of others often inhibits helping behavior, through pluralistic ignorance, diffusion of responsibility, and other processes. The gist of research on the bystander effect is that individuals are less likely to help when they are in a group as opposed to when they are alone. The present studies reach a similar conclusion that individuals often fail to act (or at least, fail to achieve their full potential) when in groups as opposed to when they are on their own. Just as individuals in an emergency may assume that they do not need to get involved because others will offer assistance, so do some participants in the present research seem to feel that they do not need to exert maximum effort because others will pick up the slack for them.
3. There are multiple possible explanations for why the presence of others impeded individual performance in Study 1. One possibility is social loafing, which suggests that participants set their goals lower when in groups and assume others will pick up the slack for their decreased effort. But another possibility is that the presence of others actually makes it harder to engage in the task in question. For example, if multiple people are pulling on a rope at once, it is possible that the additional people get in each other’s way and impede performance through coordination loss. With respect to shouting, one of the tasks used by Latané et al., an example of coordination loss would be if the sound waves of multiple participants interfered with each other. To tease apart these issues of social loafing and coordination loss, Latané et al. followed up their first study with an experiment that placed participants alone, in groups, and in “pseudo-groups,” where they believed they were in a group, but actually performed alone. The results of Study 2 indicated that participants did not perform at as high a level in pseudo-groups as they did when they were alone, suggesting some degree of coordination loss. However, performance was lowest when participants were in actual groups, demonstrating that both coordination loss and social loafing account for the results of Study 1.
4. The reading gives several reasons why participants were likely to believe that their group members were not working as hard as they were on the tasks in question. Participants may have attributed this apparent discrepancy in effort to a lack of motivation or ability on the part of their fellow group members. To the extent that participants believed that their group members were not holding up their end of their bargain, they may have decided that they themselves would not try as hard on subsequent trials of the experiment. After all, why should they work hard to make up for the poor performance of the others? In this way, by attributing the performance of their group members to low motivation, participants themselves were likely to demonstrate social loafing on subsequent experimental trials.
5. First, social loafing should be less likely to occur on tasks where individual contributions to the group’s performance are identifiable. For example, if a researcher presented participants with the same task as Latané et al. used, but had a large monitor in the center of the room that displayed each participant’s performance for all to see, loafing should decrease dramatically. Participants would no longer feel that they could “hide in the crowd,” and they would also be able to get an accurate assessment of their group members’ performance, which should reduce the likelihood of mistaken attributions related to equity. Another factor that should make social loafing less likely would be to select a task of personal importance to participants or greater difficulty. As Chapter 8 suggests, research indicates that in the absence of evaluation apprehension, individuals often perform better on a challenging task than they would have on their own. The explanation usually given for this finding is that freedom from evaluation apprehension also frees a person from anxiety about the task.
6. Social loafing on a class project would be most likely to occur if participants felt that their own contributions to the group could not be identified. One strategy to combat loafing would be to require students to submit for evaluation specific components of the project for review, thus giving them personal responsibility and accountability for their contribution as the project progresses. It would also be important to make sure that all students were aware of the contributions of the other group members, so that individuals would not mistakenly assume that they were working harder than everyone else, which can lead to equity-related attributions. Finally, it would be advisable to choose a topic or project that is challenging and of intrinsic interest to the students. Social loafing has been found to be less likely to occur on such tasks. In fact, the presence of others often leads to improved performance when evaluation apprehension is absent and a task is challenging or engaging.
Links For Further Investigation
Social loafing is clearly problematic for businesses that rely on group productivity, whether you consider manufacturing tasks that require multiple workers or corporations that make use of team assignments. For an article that addresses how to overcome the threat of loafing and foster effective teamwork in the business setting, see
As Question #1 above suggests, social loafing is relevant to some of the same variables and situations as social facilitation. And, like social loafing, social facilitation sometimes spotlights the negative effects of other people on individual performance. One such example is the concept of “choking under pressure,” an idea that is often discussed in the context of sports performance. For a discussion of scientific research on choking in sports, check out On the flip side of the coin, most sports fans are also familiar with the idea of the “clutch” performance under pressure. For a statistical analysis of whether there really is such thing as a clutch hitter in baseball (a topic of great debate among statisticians who research the sport), go to