Ringelmann effect

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The Ringelmann effect is the fact that people in the group perform less collective physical performance than would be expected based on the summed up individual performance. In 1974, Ingham and colleagues took up the Ringelmann effect and described their research results as social idleness . Both terms mean a loss of motivation in groups and a resulting drop in performance. With the Ringelmann effect, however, it is unclear whether the loss of performance is due to motivation or coordination. Since a lack of coordination can be remedied more easily than a lack of motivation, the Ringelmann effect - in contrast to social laziness - is hardly the subject of research.

Name-giving experiment

The French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931) studied the efficiency of the work of horses, oxen, machines and people from 1882 to 1887 and found out in experiments to pull loads that the performance of people in groups is less than the sum of the Achievements that everyone would achieve on their own. The more people Ringelmann let pull the load at the same time, the less effort the individual participants performed (he tested one, seven and fourteen men). As an engineer, Ringelmann was not interested in the reasons for this loss of performance and only speculated that the drop in performance could be due to a lack of coordination (because the participants had to pull as simultaneously as possible) and a reduced motivation of the participants.

The Ringelmann experiment is often misrepresented even in current textbooks, since the original document could not be found for a long time. However, Kravitz and Martin republished the article in 1986 and made it clear, among other things, that the larger the group, the smaller the performance per person. Whether it is one or two people makes a big difference. But whether there are six or fifteen people is almost irrelevant to the performance of the individual (so the drop in performance is not linear).

Since the Ringelmann experiment took place sometime between 1882 and 1887, it is now considered the first social psychological experiment ever, even if it was only published in 1913, i.e. after Triplet's experiments on social facilitation .

Recent research

Until the 1970s it was not known exactly what Ringelmann had found, as the only available source was a mention in a book by Moede (1927). It was not until 1974 that Ingham and colleagues actively dealt with the "Ringelmann Effect" again. As psychologists, they were primarily interested in separating loss of motivation and loss of coordination. Therefore they chose a task similar to Ringelmann's tug-of-war and systematically varied the group size. What was new, however, was that they blindfolded the test subjects and sometimes let them pull in pseudo-groups: The participants thought that they were pulling in the group, but in reality they were alone. In this way one could rule out the loss of coordination. Nevertheless, there was still a reduced strength of the individual persons in the supposed group situation, which became more and more extreme with increasing group size. The problem with this experiment, however, was that the group size with the number of spectators confounded was: The less people moved, the more people were standing next to it as a spectator. So it could not be ruled out that - instead of reduced effort in the group situation - the phenomenon of social facilitation in the individual situation due to the higher number of viewers was responsible for the effect found.

Strictly speaking, the experiment by Ingham and colleagues is the last one on the Ringelmann effect and the first one on social laziness , because here the loss of coordination has already been separated from the loss of motivation. There are no other experiments on the Ringelmann effect, because the psychologists are primarily interested in the loss of motivation. No one is surprised that it is more difficult to pull a rope at the same time with several people. In contrast, it is not so easy to explain why one is less motivated.

Physical explanation

The coordination-related loss of performance during the tug of war can be explained physically as follows:

  1. Each person pulls the rope diagonally in a slightly different direction and thus works with a slightly reduced vector component compared to their respective maximum possible force.
  2. Everyone doesn't pull with the same force all the time, but every now and then with a jerk. This jolt doesn't always come at the same time. Even if experienced teams can practice this, the “coordination problem” reduces the theoretical maximum performance. With problems that require a large organization, the problem of coordination becomes even greater.

See also

literature

  • Ringelmann, M. (1913). Research on les moteurs animés. Travail de l'homme. In: Annales de l'Institut National Agronomique, 2e série, tome XII (pp. 1-40).
  • Kravitz, DA and Martin, B. (1986): Ringelmann rediscovered: The original article. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 936-941.
  • Ingham, AG, Levinger, G., Graves, J. and Peckham, V. (1974): The Ringelmann Effect: Studies of group size and group performance . Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 10 , pp. 371-384.
  • Jeannine Ohlert: Team effort. Social loafing in preparation for a group assignment . Publishing house Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8300-4001-9 .
  • Hunt, Morton (1991): The Practice of Social Research. Reports from everyday science . Campus, Frankfurt / M. 1991, ISBN 3-593-34278-2
  • Oelsnitz, Dietrich von der & Busch, Michael W. (2006): Social Loafing. Reduced performance in teams . Personalführung, vol. 39 (2006), issue 9, pp. 64–75.

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