United We Stand Around

For most Americans, a job is a social undertaking. On assembly lines and at construction sites, in offices and around operating tables, many hands make light work. Yet a team of psychologists has found that people may work harder when alone. In groups, the researchers say, Americans become "social loafers."

The team tested a group of Ohio State University students swimming laps, while others were making noise clapping and shouting. Each noisemaker let his output drop by half when he switched from solitude to a group of four. The researchers theorize that workers do poorly in a group because they know they will not be accountable for individual performance (the swimmers slowed down when they thought their personal times were unrecorded) or suspect that fellow workers are not working as hard as they. The experimenters believe social loafing could account for the slowed growth of American labor productivity. Says Drake Professor Kipling Williams: "What we're finding is that when people work collectively on a task, they put out less effort than if working alone." Williams neglected to mention whether the phenomenon is observable among teams of psychology professors.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.