Social Loafing: Getting Groups to Work Well Together

PsyBlog has an excellent summary of the research on social loafing, the phenomena where people working in a group work less compared to when they work alone. Because we do so much group work, this is sometimes an issue.

The first research on social loafing came from Max Ringelmann way back in 1913 (Ringelmann, 1913). He had people pulling on a rope, and compared the maximum they could have pulled, based on individual test, to how much each person actually pulled. The results were, kind of, sad; with eight people, each one only pulled half as much as their maximum potential strength. A graph of Ringelmann’s data is shown below. If everyone pulled at their maximum the line would have stayed horizontal at 1.

ringelmann-data — The relative loafing of people working in a group. As the group gets larger, the amount of work per person decreases from its maximum of 1. Data from Ringelmann (1913)

The PsyBlog article points out three reasons why people tend to loaf in groups:

We expect others to loaf so we do it, too.
We feel more anonymous the larger the group, so we feel less need to put in the effort.
We often don’t have a clear idea about how much we need to contribute, so we don’t put in as much as we could.

This can be summed up in Latane’s Social Theory:

If a person is the target of social forces, increasing the number of other persons diminishes the relative social pressure on each person.

— Latane et al., 1979: Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psycology. Quote via Keith Rolag’s Website.

How do we deal with this

The key is making sure students are motivated to do the work. We want self-motivated students, but creating the right environment, especially by training students in how to work in a group will help.

Make sure students realize the importance of their work; this makes them more motivated.
Build group cohesion; team members contribute more if they value the group they’re in.
Make sure the group clearly and fairly divides the work. Let everyone be part of the decision making process so students have choices in what to do will help them be more invested in their part of the work.
Make sure each group member feels accountable for their share of the work.

A Brief Excursion into Mathematics

Ringelmann’s data falls on a remarkably straight line, so I used Excel to plot a trendline. As my algebra students know, you only need two points to write the equation of a line, however, Excel uses linear regression to get the best-fit line through all the data. Not all the data points will be on the line (sometimes none of them will be on the line) but the sum of the distance from each point to the line is minimized.

Curiously, since the data is pretty close to a straight line, you can extend the line to the x-axis to find out how many people it would take for no-one to be exerting any force at all. Students should be able to determine the equation of the line on their own, but you can get Excel to give you the equation of the trendline. From the plot we see:

y = -0.0732 x + 1.0707

At the x-axis, y = 0, so;

0 = -0.0732 x + 1.0707

solving for x we first subtract the constant, 1.0707 from both sides to get:

0 – 1.0707 = -0.0732 x + 1.0707 – 1.0707

giving:

-1.0707 = -0.0732 x

then divide by -0.0732 to isolate x:

$! \frac{-1.0707}{-0.0732} = \frac{-0.0732 x}{-0.0732}$

which yields:

x = 14.63

This means that with 15 people, no-one will be pulling on the rope. In fact, according to this equation, they’ll actually start pushing on the rope.

It’s an amazing result, but if you can find flaws with my argument or math, please let me know.

Rewards and motivation

… tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation.
— Desi et al., 1999.

Edward Deci (and others) published a paper (pdf) in 1999 that analyzed a whole bunch of earlier studies on how extrinsic rewards affect motivation. Their conclusion is that rewards are generally bad because rewards prevent people from learning how to motivate themselves.

… the primary negative effect of rewards is that they tend to forestall self-regulation. In other words, [expectation of rewards] undermine people’s taking responsibility for motivating or regulating themselves
— Desi et al., 1999.

So while they may work in the short term, rewards do long-term damage.

When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short term and opt for controlling people’s behavior, they may be having a substantially negative long-term effect.
— Desi et al., 1999.

They also find that rewards can push you into a negative feedback loop, because to properly administer a reward you usually need increased monitoring and you produce more competition. Both of these undermine intrinsic motivation so you’re left with using more extrinsic rewards. (think also of high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind).

So what to do? Desi et al. report that:

intrinsic motivation … requires environmental supports. …the necessary supports are opportunities to satisfy the innate needs for competence and self-determination.

(Note: I found out about this article while reading Daniel Pink’s, Drive).

War games and aggression

In terms of general use, girls utilized computers to connect with others, and boys used computers to compete with others. – Christie (2005)

There are clear gender differences in the way adolescents use computers and play computer/console games. Boys tend toward the violent, competitive games. This is not just my own experience as the above quote from a large study of middle schoolers in South Carolina shows.

Furthermore, and more worrisome, the violence in the games may spill over into real life. In 2004, Gentile et al. found that:

Adolescents who expose themselves to greater amounts of video game violence were more hostile, reported getting into arguments with teachers more frequently, were more likely to be involved in physical fights, and performed more poorly in school. –

They reference a 2001 study by Anderson and Bushman that integrated a lot of the previous work and showed that:

… across 54 independent tests of the relation between video game violence and aggression, involving 4262 participants, there appear to be five consistent results of playing games with violent content. Playing violent games increases aggressive behaviors, increases aggressive cognitions, increases aggressive emotions, increases physiological arousal, and decreases prosocial behaviors. These effects are robust; they have been found in children and adults, in males and females, and in experimental and non- experimental studies

In graphical form it looks like this:

How video games lead to violence — How video games lead to aggression. (From Anderson and Bushman, 2001)

I can’t say I’ve observed this myself, but it is certainly cause for concern. In fact, a later study by the same authors and Nicholas Carnagey (Carnagey et al., 2007) found that people who played violent video games were actually physically desensitized to violence (though the method used in this study is not nearly as convincing as the previous work).

Finally, the degree you can personalize characters in video games is improving rapidly. Some very recent research from Fischer et al. (2010) found that:

playing a violent video game with a personalized game character … increased aggressive responses.

I have to say that I find the evidence from this albeit quick survey of the science to be both disturbing and damning. Of course these scientific studies are statistical averages, and each individual is different and is affected by a larger environment than is just in the violent video games. Indeed, I have played these games myself, I know intensive gamers, and have students who regularly play these games and can’t say that I’ve observed much correlation with the games and aggressive behavior. But then again it is sometimes hard to see the forest from beneath the trees.

I guess I’m going to have to be more strict about violent video games. We don’t allow them in the classroom (in general), but I think I’m going to have to stress the issue a bit more when I talk to students and their parents. Of particular concern is when violent games overlap with video game addiction. As with everything in life, moderation is important, and in a time when students are going through large changes and discovering themselves it is essential to help them with self-regulation.