Social Loafing
When Others Relax Us In the tasks relevant to social facilitation effects, an individual’s behavior can be identified and evaluated. But on some tasks, efforts are pooled so that the specific performance of any one individual cannot be determined. It just so hap- pens that research on these kinds of collective endeavors can also be traced back to Triplett’s era of the late nineteenth century. In Chapter 1 we mentioned the French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann as another contender for having conducted the first social psychology research. In research conducted during the 1880s, Ringelmann discovered that people’s output declined when they worked together rather than alone on simple tasks like pull- ing a rope or pushing a cart.
Why did individual output decline? One explanation is that the individuals exerted less effort when they acted collectively, but another expla- nation is that the individuals simply demonstrated poor coordination when working together—some pulled while others relaxed and vice versa. How can you distinguish lack of effort from poor coor- dination in a task like this? Nearly 100 years after Ringelmann’s research, Alan Ingham and colleagues (1974) answered this question by using a rope-pulling machine and blindfolding partici- pants. In one condition, participants were led to think that they were pulling with a bunch of other participants, and in another condition, the participants were informed that they were pulling alone (which, in fact, they were).
