Social loafing has been described as the phenomenon in which participants who work together generate less effort than do participants who work alone (e.g., Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Subsequent research (Harkins & Jackson, 1985; Williams, Harkins, & Latane, 1981) has shown that a particular aspect of this paradigm leads to the loafing effect. When participants "work together," their outputs are pooled (combined) so that evaluation of individual output is not possible. In those studies, the evaluation potential of the experimenter has been emphasized. However, when the experimenter could not evaluate individual outputs, neither could the participants evaluate themselves. In this study we tested the possibility that the opportunity for the participants to evaluate themselves would be sufficient to eliminate the loafing effect. In two experiments, the evaluation potential of the experimenter (experimenter evaluation vs. no experimenter evaluation) was crossed with the potential for self-evaluation (self-evaluation vs. no self-evaluation). In both experiments, consistent with previous loafing research, the potential for evaluation by the experimenter was sufficient to increase motivation, whether participants could self-evaluate or not. However, when the experimenter could not evaluate the participants' outputs, the potential for self-evaluation reliably improved participant performance. In fact, self-evaluation was the only motivation needed for participants to exert as much effort as that exhibited by participants who could be evaluated by the experimenter. Social loafing has been described as the phenomenon in which participants who work together generate less effort than do participants who work alone (Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). This reduction in effort has been found to occur on tasks that require both physical effort (clapping, Harkins, Latane, &

Recent work (e.g., Harkins, 1987; Szymanski & Harkins, 1987) has suggested that social loafing occurs because participants' outputs cannot be evaluated by the experimenter, by the coactors, or by the participants themselves. This analysis has focused on the output of the individual, but in loafing research, participants work together to produce a group product. However, in this prior work participants have been unable to make anything of this group product, because no standard of comparison has been made available. Several recent formulations (e.g., Goethals & Darley, 1987) have suggested that the potential for group evaluation could motivate performance. Testing this hypothesis in 2 experiments, 1 using an optimizing task and the other a maximizing task, we found that providing a standard that allowed the "group" to evaluate its performance eliminated the loafing effect. The implications of these findings for current theories of group evaluation are discussed. Kerr (1983) has identified several types of group motivation loss effects (e.g., free-riding, the sucker effect, and social loafing), and has suggested that different processes account for

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Social loafing research has shown that participants working together put out less effort than participants working individually (Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979), apparently a result of the fact that evaluation is not possible when outputs are pooled (Harkins & Jackson, 1985). On the other hand, research on creativity (e.g., Amabile, 1979), suggests that minimizing the expectation of evaluation facilitates performance. In the present study, treatment conditions typically used in social loafing and creativity research were incorporated in a single design. Participants were asked either to generate as many uses as possible for a common object or to generate uses that were as creative as possible. Participants were also led to believe either that their outputs could be evaluated or that their outputs would be pooled with those of others. The performance of participants given number instructions was facilitated by the prospect of evaluation. However, when asked to be creative, participants whose outputs were pooled performed better than participants whose outputs could be evaluated. These data suggest that on tasks that require creativity, conditions that are thought to lead to "loafing" can have the opposite effect.