#4
022.
(1) When members of a group are working cooperatively, they can clearly accomplish more than a single individual can. Indeed, some human achievements are possible only when several people participate through a group process that integrates their contributions. The economic, technological, and political their inte complexity of contemporary society demands such diverse skills that no one can hope to master them all. Most industrial, scientific, and governmental enterprises now require many specialists, each contributing expertise in a different field.
(2) However, researchers studying group processes have discovered that as groups increase in size, each group member's contribution tends to mdecline. In the late 1920's, researchers found that when people pull together on a rope, each exerts less force than if he or she were pulling on the rope alone. Working alone, one person pulled nearly 63 kg, but two people working together pulled, not 126 kg (2×63),but 118 kg. And three people pulled 160 kg, which is only about two and one half times what a single individual pulls. This and other studies led to the conclusion that people work less hard when they are part of a group than when they work alone. Apparently, individuals slacken their efforts when there are many contributors to a common task. In short, they become lazy.
(3) The social impact theory holds that the larger the group, the less pressure there is on any one member to produce. The theory suggests that it is the diffusion of responsibility for the group's work that leads each individual to reduce his or her effort. Social psychologist Stephen Harkins suggested in the late 1980's that it is specifically the anonymity of performance that encourages laziness. When each individual believes that no one can eldetect how much he or she is contribut 25 ing, all tend to produce less. When individual contributions can be identified, as when the experimenter measures how much each has contributed, laziness is reduced
(4) Researchers have discovered that being evaluated by others is not the only thing that keeps people working. When people can evaluate their own perfor 30 mance by comparing it to the previous performance of others on the same task, they work hardーeven though the experimenter cannot acalculate how much they have contributed. Self-evaluation apparently provides them with the satis faction of matching or surpassing the "standard" performance on the task. It seems that asocial laziness deve ops when there is no way for people to tell how well they are doing.