Social Loafing in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

Research conducted in the United States indicates that people exert greater effort in a variety of task situations when they perform individually than when they do so in a group that obscures identifiability of members' individual outputs, a phenomenon termed "social loafing." It was hypothesized that members of cultures whose value emphases and social institutions have been characterized as "group-oriented" would tend to form more cohesive groups and be more likely to place group benefit over individual benefit than members of individualistic U.S. culture, hence evidencing less social loafing. Contrary to this expectation, Chinese school children on Taiwan (grades 2 through 9), asked to produce sound by clapping and shouting alone and in pairs, evidenced levels of social loafing similar to those obtained in U.S. research employing this procedure. Several sources of this absence of a relationship between social loafing and cultural values are discussed, including the effects of the social restrictiveness of the sound production procedure on its ability to tap cultural differences.