I used to hate group projects when I was in school. Group projects weren't so bad when you could handpick the other members of the group, but things were much worse when the teacher randomly assigned the members. Inevitably, there was always one or two members of the group who would be more than happy to let the others (which usually included me) do the majority of the work. I never really understood the point of assigning the same grade to the entire group, particularly in these cases when a few members of the group didn't contribute very much.
I understand the point now. I've been working in groups and as part of teams for my entire professional life. And even if I couldn't identify them by name, I learned and experienced just about every possible form of group dynamic while working on those group projects during school. One of the most frustrating dynamics to deal with in any group setting (and which is described in the situations I remember from school) is called "social loafing", which refers to the tendency for individuals to exert less effort when working in a group as opposed to working by themselves.
As with most things, the term "social loafing" has a backstory. All the way back in 1913, a French agricultural engineer named Max Ringelmann conducted an experiment involving the game, tug-of-war. Ringelmann noted that when individuals pulled on the rope as a group that they exerted significantly less effort than when they pulled on the rope alone. Study participants pulled on a rope for approximately 5 seconds by themselves, as a group of 7 participants, or as a group of 14 participants. Ringelmann measured the amount of force that each individual pulled. When by themselves, participants pulled 85.3 kg versus 65.0 kg and 61.4 kg when part of a 7-person or 14-person group, respectively. He noted similar results when participants were asked to push a two-wheeled cart instead.
Okay, that's pretty cool. But maybe participants didn't have to pull as hard when the workload was spread out among several other members of the group? Couldn't that explain at least some of these results? In order to answer that question, Ringelmann next measured the amount of force pulled against the rope in groups ranging from 1 to 8 members. He set the the total force exerted by one participant to an indexed result of 1. The force exerted by 2 participants was 1.86 (again, an indexed measure), and increasing sequentially up to 8 members was 2.55, 3.08, 3.50, 3.78, 3.92, and 3.92 per individual, respectively. Note that the relationship between the force exerted by an individual and group size was curvilinear. In other words, as group size increased, the total force exerted for the group as a whole decreased. However, the difference between two-and three-person groups was greater than the difference between four- and five-person groups. The difference between seven- and eight-person groups was even smaller. Ringelmann suggested that participants in the larger groups were less motivated to pull hard, i.e. they were "loafing". It's as if individuals thought to themselves, "Since there are so many people in this group pulling, they don't need me tp pull as hard as they would if we were in a smaller group." This phemenon has come to be called "social loafing" or classically, the "Ringelmann effect".
All of this reminds me of two additional and related concepts known as the "free rider problem" and the "diffusion of responsibility" (also known as the "bystander effect"). First, "diffusion of responsibility" refers to the phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to take responsbility for action (or inaction) when others are present. It is a form of "social loafing" that I've posted about in the past, in which I mentioned the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 (Genovese was the victim of a brutal murder in which at least 38 individuals heard or saw the crime being committed yet failed to call the police) and the so-called "Good Samaritan" study in 1973. The "free rider problem" , in contrast, refers to the situation where individuals take advantage of a common good or service without paying for it. Commonly cited examples of this problem include the use of Wikipedia, public television, or even clean air or water. The key difference between "free riders" and "social loafers" is that the "free riders" contribute absolutely nothing, while the "social loafers" contribute at least some effort, even if minimal.
As I mentioned in my last post on the "Tragedy of the Commons", all of these issues become important when "playing" a noncooperative game, such as the N-person, iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Next time I will talk about one more important concept known as "moral hazard".
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