Group Size and Social Loafing

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On many education and learning blogs, you can find students and instructors complaining about one of the most dreaded assignments of all time: the group project. At first glance, doesn’t it seem that group projects should be easier than working solo? There are more minds to share in the work and more people to try out ideas with. But what we all dread is having group members who don’t pull their own weight. The fact is, the larger a group, the more prone members may become to social loafing—failing to invest the same level of effort in the group that they’d put in if they were working alone or with one other person. Even in cutthroat competitions like Survivor, there are always a few contestants who manage to make it through to the final simply by keeping their heads low and letting their teammates do most of the work.

Clearly, social loafing affects both participation and communication in groups (Comer, 1998; Shultz, 1999). When a person fails to speak up because he or she feels shy around a lot of people, the person is engaging in social loafing. Social loafing also results from the feelings of anonymity that occur in large groups, where it is more difficult for an individual member’s contributions to be evaluated. Thus, a member may put in less effort, believing that nobody will notice that he or she is slacking or, conversely, that he or she is working hard. Social loafing even occurs in large electronic networks: some members of an online discussion group, for example, may actively engage in the discourse by posting regular messages, while others—known as lurkers—may just read others’ posts and contribute very little.