Social Loafing on an Optimizing Task

Abstract

Research conducted in the United States and in several non-Western societies has found that people exert greater effort when they work individually than when they do so in a group that obscures identifiability of members' individual outputs, a phenomenon termed "social loafing." It was argued that the apparent transcultural generality of social loafing may be limited to tasks that participants perceive as undiagnostic with respect to the competencies that they assume are valued by important referent others in the research setting. It was predicted that on diagnostic tasks members of group-oriented cultures such as the Chinese would be less likely than members of individualistic cultures to exhibit social loafing. Schoolchildren in the sixth and ninth grade in the United States and China (Taiwan) performed an auditory tracking task that required counting tone patterns alone and in pairs. Consistent with our hypotheses, Americans evidenced social loafing on this task, whereas Chinese exhibited the opposite pattern ("social striving"), performing better in pairs than alone. Alternate sources of this cultural difference in social loafing within the global "group-orientedness" variable are proposed.