Social facilitation & loafing

It can be defined as 'an improvement in performance produced by the mere presence of others'. It is also known as the audience effect. Compared to an individuals performance when alone, when in the presence of others, they tend to perform better on simple or well-rehearsed tasks and worse on complex or new ones.

The Yerkes-Dodson law, when applied to social facilitation, states that the presence of other people will enhance the performance in speed and accuracy of well-practiced tasks but will degrade the performance of less familiar tasks.

One of the first psychologists to conduct a study on this effect was Norman Triplett. In his research on the speed records of cyclists, he noticed that racing against each other rather than against the clock alone increased the cyclists' speeds. He then attempted to duplicate this under lab conditions using children and fishing reels. They were either alone or in pairs but working alone. Their task was to wind in a given amount of fishing line. Results showed that children worked faster in the presence of a partner. This demonstrates the co-action effect.

This refers to the phenomenon whereby you perform better at doing a task when in the presence of others doing the same task. The co-action effect may come into operation if you find you work well in a library in preference to working at home where it is equally quiet.

Other co-action effect studies include Chen (1937) who observed that worker ants will dig more than 3 times as much sand per ant when working (non-cooperatively) alongside other ants than when working alone.

Platt, Yaksh & Darby (1967) found that animals will eat more of their food if there are others of their species present

Social facilitation occurs not only in the presence of a co-actor but also in the presence of a passive spectator/audience. This is known as the audience effect.

Dashiell (1935) found that the presence of an audience improved subjects' multiplication performance by increasing the amount of simple multiplications completed.

Travis (1925) found that well-trained subjects were better at a psychomotor task in front of spectators.

Pessin (1933) found an opposite audience effect: subjects needed fewer trials at learning a list of nonsense words when on their own than when in front of an audience.

The extent of social facilitation or inhibition depends upon the nature of the interaction between the task and performer. In some cases the presence of co-actors/audience improved quality of performance, but in others it impaired quality. If the person performing the task thinks it is easy, an audience can improve performance. If it is deemed difficult, performance is impaired.

Social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they're working in a group as opposed to working alone. Research on social loafing began with rope pulling experiments by Ringelmann, who found that members of a group tended to exert less effort in pulling a rope than did individuals alone. Many of the causes of social loafing stem from an individual feeling that his or her effort will not matter to the group.

Ringelmann's (1913) study found that when he asked a group of men to pull on a rope, they didn't pull as hard collectively as they did when each was pulling alone. In contrast with Ringelmann's first findings, Bibb Latane et al. replicated previous social loafing findings whilst demonstrating that the decreased performance of groups was attributable to reduced individual effort, as distinct from a deterioration due to coordination. They blindfolded male college students and made them wear headphones to mask all noise. They then asked them to shout both in actual groups and pseudogroups in which they shouted alone but believed they were shouting with others. When subjects believed one other person was shouting, they shouted 82% as intensely as they did alone, but with 5 others, their effort decreased to 74%. Latane et al. concluded that increasing the number of people in a group diminished the realtive social pressure on each person.

Dan J Rothwell: "The three Cs of motivation" - collaboration, content, and choice. The answer to social loafing may be motivation. Collaboration refers to getting everyone involved by assigning eahc member special and meaningful tasks. Content refers to identifying the importance of the individual's specific tasks within the group. If group members see their role as being important, they are more likely to fulfil it. Choice is about giving group members the opportunity to choose the task they want to fulfil. If they have a task they didn't ask for and don't want to do, this greatly increases the potential for social loafing.

Other strategies for reducing social loafing are: trusting other group members, liking the group, having challenging tasks, giving unique contributions, and having each member take full accountability.