The "sucker effect" & social loafing !

Meditate the following scenarios

Have you ever been at a concert or an event where the main speaker asks the audience to say something or maybe clap, not everyone does, why is that?

When you’re in a Zoom conference room of 100 participants, it’s easier to feel like you can turn your camera off, grab a snack, or zone out, why is that?

A bit of a history

In 1913, Maximillian Ringelmann – a French agricultural engineer who was focused on studying efficiencies and productivity of horses, oxen, man, and machines in the domain of agriculture- observed that; if a horse was pulling a carriage, adding another horse to pull the carriage did not yield the sum of the potential power of the two horses, in fact the contribution of each horse deteriorated a bit.

The experiment was extended to tug-war (pulling rope) and the same conclusion was drawn, whereby, the pulling power of the group was less than the sum of the individual strengths of its members and the average contribution of each member kept on decreasing as more members were added to the team, that is, the individual contribution of each member dropped to less than 50% of his potential effort when the group reached 8 members only. Fascinating! I have summarized in the table below how the individual contribution deteriorated

This is known as the “Ringelmann effect” or what is known as “Social loafing”.

???????????“Ringelmann effect

the tendency for groups to become less productive in terms of output per member as they increase in size…. He found that groups often outperform individuals but that the addition of each new member to a group yields less of a gain in productivity. Subsequent studies suggest that this loss of productivity is caused by the reduction of motivation experienced in groups (social loafing) and the inefficiency of larger groups.” American Psychological association (2020)

“When nobody’s noticing what you are or aren’t doing, the easier it is to keep doing nothing” Schneider (2016)

While the reality is indeed that groups accomplish more, the argument is, the individual contributions of its members sometimes tend to deteriorate if ownership or accountability over individuals’ contributions is not measured or captured and simply should the project fail, it is not necessarily anyone's fault!

Many theories came to explain the “social loafing effect” like, the social compensation hypothesis by Karan(1991), or Evaluation potential hypothesis by Harkings et al (1987) or the social impact theory by Latane et al (1979) just to name a few. What I found interesting in those articles was the term pinned as the “sucker effect”, defined by the American Psychological association (2020)

“Sucker effect

a phenomenon in which individuals reduce their personal investment in a group endeavor because of their expectation that others will think negatively of them for working too hard or contributing too much (considering them to be a sucker).”

How to avoid the social loafing or how to manage it?

-??????Create clear assignments

-??????Divide into subgroups

-??????Increase supervision

-??????Provide individual recognition

(indeed, 2020)

Many people, like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, use the “two pizza rule:” If you can’t feed a group with two pizzas, it’s?too big.

Many people, like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, use the “two pizza rule:” If you can’t feed a group with two pizzas, your group is too big.?The scrum guide, which outlines the group-focused scrum approach to development, says optimal performance happens in groups of 3-9.?Ringelmann, though, noticed the most significant decrease in effort as soon as one person worked with even one or two more people. Schneider (2016)