Social Loafing on an Optimizing Task

Abstract

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.

Models of the self: Self-construals and gender.

“…Furthermore, the degree of social loafing in groups is much larger in Western cultures than Eastern cultures, in which individuals are more likely to have developed an interdependent self-construal. In fact, at least one study documents the opposite effect, termed “social striving,” among Chinese students (Gabrenya, Wang, & Latane, 1985). In this study, Chinese ninth graders tended to work harder in groups than when alone, in contrast to U.S. ninth graders who reduced their effort in groups.…”

Positive Effekte sozialen Faulenzens beim Lösen komplexer Probleme

“…Die Aufgabenstellung für die Probanden besteht darin, dass jeweils drei Personen gemeinsam mit den ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Löschgeräten (Feuerwehrautos und Hubschrauber) einen Flächenbrand bekämpfen müssen, der in bestimmten Segmenten auf der Bildschirmoberfläche ausbricht. In Anlehnung an Steiners Taxonomie handelt es sich beim gemeinsamen Bekämpfen der Feuer um eine additive Optimierungsaufgabe (Steiner 1972 (Comer 1995;Earley 1989;Gabrenya et al 1983Gabrenya et al , 1985Williams, Nida, Baca und Latané 1989 (Karau und Williams 1993, 1995Shepperd 1993 (Duval und Wicklund 1972, 1973Wicklund 1975). Beim Lösen des komplexen Problems wird dieser Leistungsstandard nicht so einfach erzielt, weshalb sich Personen umso mehr anstrengen.…”

The Social Psychology of Sport

“…That is, social loafing may be less apparent in group-oriented societies where collective undertakings are stressed and valued by the culture. This hypothesis was tested in comparing the performance of u.S. and Taiwanese schoolchildren on an auditory tracking task (Gabrenya, Wang, & Latane, 1985). Whereas the American youngsters predictably exhibited social loafing, the Chinese children, by contrast, showed just the opposite behavior in the group setting.…”