Research conducted in the United States indicates that people exert greater effort in a variety of task situations when they perform individually than when they do so in a group that obscures identifiability of members' individual outputs, a phenomenon termed "social loafing." It was hypothesized that members of cultures whose value emphases and social institutions have been characterized as "group-oriented" would tend to form more cohesive groups and be more likely to place group benefit over individual benefit than members of individualistic U.S. culture, hence evidencing less social loafing. Contrary to this expectation, Chinese school children on Taiwan (grades 2 through 9), asked to produce sound by clapping and shouting alone and in pairs, evidenced levels of social loafing similar to those obtained in U.S. research employing this procedure. Several sources of this absence of a relationship between social loafing and cultural values are discussed, including the effects of the social restrictiveness of the sound production procedure on its ability to tap cultural differences.

Research conducted in the United States and in several non-Western societies has found that people exert greater effort when they work individually than when they do so in a group that obscures identifiability of members' individual outputs, a phenomenon termed "social loafing." It was argued that the apparent transcultural generality of social loafing may be limited to tasks that participants perceive as undiagnostic with respect to the competencies that they assume are valued by important referent others in the research setting. It was predicted that on diagnostic tasks members of group-oriented cultures such as the Chinese would be less likely than members of individualistic cultures to exhibit social loafing. Schoolchildren in the sixth and ninth grade in the United States and China (Taiwan) performed an auditory tracking task that required counting tone patterns alone and in pairs. Consistent with our hypotheses, Americans evidenced social loafing on this task, whereas Chinese exhibited the opposite pattern ("social striving"), performing better in pairs than alone. Alternate sources of this cultural difference in social loafing within the global "group-orientedness" variable are proposed.