Social lazing around

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The term social loafing (engl. Social loafing ) describes a social psychology relevant phenomenon in a group. As soon as individuals work collectively with others towards a common goal and their individual performance is not known, their physiological tension is reduced. This relaxation leads to a decrease in performance in simple tasks and an increase in performance in difficult, for example new or complex tasks. For example, there is social laziness with rowers, but not with swimming relay teams, because the times of the individual swimmers are still visible there. A number of factors can aggravate or inhibit social laziness.

Social idleness is a further development of the Ringelmann effect , in which it is unclear whether the reduced performance is due to a lack of coordination between the participants or a loss of motivation.

The opposite term to social idleness is social relief : If the performance of the individual becomes visible, the resulting excitement leads to a decrease in performance for difficult tasks and an increase in performance for simple tasks.

Name-giving experiment

After the French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann had already discovered at the end of the 19th century that the performance of a group in pulling loads does not increase linearly with the number of people, Ingham and colleagues did not deal with this phenomenon again until 1974. For the first time, they succeeded in finding out that the lower performance is not only due to the difficult coordination in a larger group, but also to the loss of motivation of the individual persons (see Ringelmann effect ). The problem with Ingham's experiment, however, is that you cannot say whether the performance in the individual situation was perhaps better because more people were watching ( social facilitation ).

Bibb Latané and colleagues took up this problem again in 1979 . They used another task, namely volume production by clapping and shouting. Like Ingham and colleagues, they too used “pseudo-groups” in the experiment. The subjects wore blindfolds and headphones and also received their instructions through these headphones. The participants now thought that they should clap and shout in the group, but in reality they were the only ones producing sound. In this way, Latané and colleagues were able to separate the loss of motivation from the loss of coordination, exclude social simplification and thus, in addition to replicating Ingham's results, for the first time show the loss of motivation in its pure form independently of other factors. To her found phenomenon from Ringelmann effect, who also includes the loss of coordination delineate, they coined the still common concept of "social loafing", ie, in the German social loafing .

Recent developments

After Latané's experiment, a great research interest in the phenomenon of social laziness developed. In 1993, Karau and Williams summarized the 80 or so experiments on social laziness that had existed up to that point in a meta-analysis. They found that the idle effect occurs with both physical and mental tasks, whenever it is not clear how much each individual contributes to the overall performance. They also found that social idleness is more pronounced in men and in Western cultures than in women and in Eastern cultures. There are also some other characteristics of the task, the group and the situation, but also personality characteristics that promote or reduce social idleness. Since the analysis of Karau and Williams it has been considered certain that people in groups are less motivated to perform at their best.

More recent studies deal primarily with social idleness in the economy and in special situations. George (1992) was able to show that the "perceived laziness" of others is also important for one's own performance. And Ohlert (2009) was able to show that social idleness also occurs when one prepares for a task alone - one prepares oneself less well for a group task.

Attempts to explain

It is still not possible to say exactly why social idleness occurs. One can assume that the main reason is that the brain always works economically and therefore unconsciously switches to "economy mode" in situations in which it is not clear how much work you are doing yourself. In their Collective Effort Model, Karau and Williams explain the effect with the value as well as the clarity of the result for the individual: The model assumes that an individual is only motivated when he expects his individual effort to also Achievement of a valued result. According to this, a person only makes an effort if he or she has the feeling that this effort will ultimately lead to a result that is personally valuable for him or her. This applies to both the individual and the group situation. In the individual situation, the individual effort leads to individual performance, which in turn leads to an individual result that has a certain value for the agent. Here it is relatively easy for the person to assess whether their behavior will also have the desired result. In the group situation, on the other hand, the value of the individual performance is not immediately recognizable: one's own performance usually initially has an influence on the group performance. This then determines the result for the group and this ultimately results in the result for the individual, which has a certain value.

Apart from the fact that in this more complex situation the individual is less able to assess whether he or she will achieve the desired result with his exertion, individual performance drops immediately if the person feels that their own exertion is not relevant for the overall result. If, for example, a person perceives his contribution to the group as being irrelevant to the overall performance of the group (e.g. a linnet carrying a load together with ten muscled muscles), his motivation and thus the exertion decrease. The Collective Effort Model is the current model for social laziness; however, it has never been precisely checked whether it is really the value of the performance and the visibility of the results that influence personal motivation.

Measures against social laziness

Social idleness is a problem wherever performance has to be provided in teams or groups, for example in business or in sports teams. Interestingly, however, there are still no controlled studies on which measures can really prevent social laziness. However, the following measures can be assumed to reduce social laziness:

  • make the individual team members aware of their own significance and importance for the team
  • Increase the sense of responsibility of the individual team members
  • increase the personal importance of a success / good performance
  • Set both individual and team goals
  • Conduct team meetings and clarify the causes of any dissatisfaction
  • ensure that each team member can make an individual contribution that no one else makes
  • promote the creative contribution of individual opinions from all team members
  • Develop an understanding of others, e.g. B. by reversing roles

In principle, all of the above measures aim to better perceive the individual in the team, because especially when you see yourself as an individual and not as an anonymous, unimportant group member, you make more effort.

literature

  • Latané, B., Williams, KD & Harkins, S. (1979). Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 37 (6), 822-832.
  • Karau, SJ & Williams, KD (1993). Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 65 (4), 681-706.
  • Jeannine Ohlert: Team effort. Social loafing in preparation for a group assignment . Publishing house Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8300-4001-9 .
  • George, JM (1992). Extrinsic and intrinsic origins of perceived social loafing in organizations. In: Academy of Management Journal. 35 (1), 191-202.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ E. Aronson , TD Wilson, RM Akert: Social Psychology . Pearson study. 6th edition 2008. ISBN 978-3-8273-7359-5 , pp. 280ff.

See also

Web links