Don ’ t bring me down : People , puzzles , and social loafing

Identifiability (others knowing an individual’s effort) and social cohesion (personal attachment to a group) are both established influencers of social loafing (decreased effort when in a group). Much of the evidence indicates that identifiability and social cohesion are negatively correlated with social loafing. One hundred and sixty undergraduate students at a private northeast Ohio university participated in this experiment to examine the effect of identifiability and face-to-face contact on social loafing. There were independent groups of two variables: identifiability (yes or no) and group presence (present or absent). Participants worked on a puzzle for 15 minutes after which completed pieces were counted as the measure of effort. Results indicate there was no interaction between identifiability and presence of a group on social loafing and no significant main effect for either variable. DON’T BRING ME DOWN 3 Don’t Bring Me Down: Puzzles, People, and Social Loafing “When I die, I want my group members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time. ” “Group projects make me understand why Batman works alone. ” “Group projects are like The Hangover, except everyone but me is that guy on the roof. ” Jokes lamenting the trials of group work are popular on the Internet. To most, they are simply a relatable experience, but to anyone with a background in psychology they possess another aspect: the experience these jokes refer to is a well-studied pattern of behavior called social loafing. Jassawalla, Sashittal, and Malshe (2009) define social loafing as “the reduction of physical, perceptual, or cognitive effort in the presence of others” (42) when in a group, defined by Forsyth as at least two people who share a social relationship oriented toward either common goals or personal fulfillment (2010). As reported by Simms and Nichols (2014), social loafing was originally studied by Ringelmann (1913) during an experiment with tug-of-war. In his experiment, Ringelmann found that when people pulled on a rope as a group they exerted less force than when each person performed the exact same action alone. Repeated experiments since Ringelmann’s (1913) have confirmed social loafing as a pervasive factor in group work. Karau & Williams’ (1993) meta-analysis found social loafing consistently in both genders and a wide variety of different tasks, seen in some of its most wellknown studies: having participants play tug-of-war alone and with a group (Ringelmann, 1913); clapping and shouting in an empty and filled room (Latané, Harkins, & Williams, 2006); participants reviewing poems and editorials believing they were alone and in groups (Petty, Harkins, Williams, & Latané, 1987); and participants swimming in a competition-style event alone and in groups (Everett, Smith, & Williams, 1992). Thus, social loafing’s presentation in a DON’T BRING ME DOWN 4 plethora of tasks and under different circumstances makes it a key factor to study concerning groups. As social loafing has been found in so many tasks and types of groups, so too have variables that affect its influence. One such variable is a group’s cohesion, specifically social. Carron (1982) defined cohesion as the tendency of a group “to stick together and remain united” (124), using a model proposed by Festinger, Schachter and Back (1963). In it, cohesion is a sum of forces keeping a group together with two main sources: the benefits gained by membership and its inherent attractiveness. This inherent attractiveness is also called social cohesion: the personal enjoyment a member gets from being in a group, or the feelings of closeness its members have. To test the impact of social cohesion on social loafing, Høigaard, Tofteland, and Ommundsen (2006) created two groups of undergraduate students. Over the course of two days, one group performed various exercise activities to increase social cohesion: personal introductions, cooperative exercises, and forming team roles; the other did not. Then the groups ran 30-meter sprint relays with their times recorded as a benchmark for effort. The experimenters found that groups from the high social cohesion condition performed significantly better on the sprints, meaning they put forth more effort than the groups with low social cohesion. Their results indicate that high social cohesion can significantly increase effort and, in doing so, decrease social loafing. Another variable that significantly affects loafing is identifiability, which is a continuum describing the extent to which other people will know an individual’s effort ranging from a high extreme (everyone in the vicinity publicly knowing) to a low (only the individual knows how hard they truly worked. Williams, Nida, Baca, and Latané (1989) examined this influence DON’T BRING ME DOWN 5 through collegiate swim teams. They recruited 16 swimmers at the Ohio State University and divided them into four even teams, with two teams designated “low identifiable” and two “high identifiable. ” Williams et al. (1989) manipulated identifiability as “the knowledge, public and private, of an individual lap time” (76), so the highly identifiable swimmers would have their times announced out loud while the low would not. The experimenters also had the swimmers race individually as a control. With 100-meter swim time as a measure, they found that the highly identifiable group performed significantly better than the low and individual ones, while the low-identifiable group performed significantly worse than the individual. Williams et al. (1989) concluded that identifiability has a negative relationship with social loafing and a positive one with effort: the higher identifiability is, the less loafing occurs. During a more recent study, Høigaard and Ingvaldsen (2006) found results consistent with Williams et al. (1989). The pair enlisted experienced floorball players for a two-day tournament. The first day was dedicated to low identifiability: experimenters told a low identifiable group of players that the experiment was only concerned with beating the other team; they gave no indication that individual effort was a measure and secretly recorded the games. The second day was for high identifiability: experimenters told the participants that they would measure each person’s heart rate to indicate how hard they worked. The students that worked hardest, as measured by objective heart rate and a subjective Likert scale, were the ones that were the most identifiable. The experiments from Williams et al. (1989) and Høigaard and Ingvaldsen (2006) both suggest that having more identifiability in a group leads to more effort and less social loafing. Simms and Nichols (2014), in a review of studies of social loafing to date, suggested that the reason less identifiability leads to more social loafing is due to diffusion of responsibility; DON’T BRING ME DOWN 6 people in groups mentally distribute ownership of the result to other members. They assume that the ‘other’ will assume the responsibility. When put in a group setting, if everyone thinks someone else is accountable for the outcome, no one will give an optimal performance and the total result will be diminished. The authors suggest that all it takes is the idea of being in a group to make each member contribute less. These impacts of social cohesion and identifiability on social loafing are consistently present but not absolute; there are circumstances where they do not seem to have the same effect as would be expected. In another study with collegiate swimmers, Everett, Smith, and Williams (1992) examined the interactive influence of social cohesion and identifiability on social loafing. They measured the level of cohesion in the groups of male and female swimmers, then had them swim relays alone and in groups with varying degrees of identifiability. Although they did find a significant effect of identifiability, it only applied to females: the more identifiable the female groups were, the better their times were. The experimenters did not find a significant effect of social cohesion. Everett, Smith, and Williams (1992) were unsure why these results were not what they expected. They proposed it was simple variability in behavior or other confounds. These results and others like them show that, although the overwhelming consensus of data points to identifiability and social cohesion influencing social loafing, these factors do not always affect people in the same way. Past studies have extensively examined social loafing and how it manifests in groups; however, few have studied an increasingly relevant factor in group work: a lack of personal contact with group members. For example, in the past, some groups have existed with little contact between some members (such as separate branches of a company or military units stationed across regions); these groups acted largely autonomously and not as true groups, with DON’T BRING ME DOWN 7 little immediate reliance on each other. Today, many groups are physically separated but rely on each other because of advancements in technology, making lack of contact between groups a pressing factor to examine. Some modern experiments on social loafing are studying this aspect of group dynamics; groups that do not physically work together are potentially impaired by social loafing without the chance to mitigate it by building identifiability or group cohesion. Suleiman and Watson (2008) constructed a factorial design with the independent variables feedback, anonymity, and group size. Participants completed different tasks on a computer with only digital contact with their partners; the dependent variable was how many tasks participants completed. Results indicated that individuals in these technology-supported teams exhibited loafing (by completing significantly fewer tasks than those who worked alone) even when they were identifiable. The presence of social loafing concurring with the normally-mitig