Talk:Social loafing

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 February 2021 and 14 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): TylerLight.

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Verifiable

The second half of the article (merged from Social_Loafing) needs to be verified as it just sounds like pop-psychology babble rather than findings backed up by empirical data.

I removed the tag because this article is nothing but citations. Lucidish 19:52, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

This entire article is identical to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology/Groups#Social_Loafing.

Causes

I agree that social loafing occurs less when tasks are more meaningful, but this is relative. I feel like the section describing rewards and decreases in social loafing should be edited to be more concrete. Doing group work with high anonymity often leads to social loafing until the reward far exceeds the ability to depend on someone else's contribution.

Just an idea.DB--Buttonda (talk) 19:42, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Plan to re-structure article and add numerous new sources

Teslawlo and AAHernan intend to significantly improve the overall completion of this article by adhering to the below new tentative outline for the article. Please note that any planned sources that are stated are not complete and that we do intend to add more sources as we begin re-writing the article. This effort is made as part of a university course project under the direction of Robertekraut. All feedback is appreciated.

Defining social loafing

This will include a basic definition of the concept.

History

A short section covering the progression of social loafing research, from Ringelmann to present-day studies that focus on online communities.

Classic research

Unlike current article, we intend to describe the research, not just the conclusions.

• Ringelmann & his rope pulling experiments are an example of research that will be cited here.
• Social Loafing and Collectivism: A comparison of the United States and the People's Republic of China.

Contemporary research

We will cite newer research here, including the study of online communities.

• Karau, S. & Williams, K. (1993) Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 681-706.
• Is out of sight, out of mind? An empirical study of social loafing in technology-supported groups. (Laku Chidambaram, Lai Lai TunG)
• Social Loafing: A Field Investigation (Robert Liden, Sandy Wayne, Renata Jasworski, Bennett)

Online behavior-related:

• Kraut, R. E., & Resnick, P. (In press). Encouraging online contributions. In R. E. Kraut & P. Resnick (Eds.), The science of social design: Mining the social sciences to build successful online communities. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
• PIEZON, S., FERREE, W.. Perceptions of Social Loafing in Online Learning Groups: A study of Public University and U.S. Naval War College students. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, North America, 9, mar. 2008. Available at: <http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/484/1034>.

Causes of social loafing

This section will summarize the primary identified causes of social loafing based on the research cited. The emphasis will be on categorization of research findings and conciseness.

Effects of social loafing

This section will summarize the primary identified effects of social loafing based on the research cited. The emphasis will be on categorization of research findings and conciseness.

Real-life instances

Examples of prominent social loafing cases will be discussed here. This section will also highlight how social loafing is different in team vs individual sports, and face to face vs distributed groups.

Reducing social loafing

This section will discuss suggestions and conclusions regarding how to mitigate social loafing based on research articles that we have found.

• Thompson, L. L. (2003). Making the team: A guide for managers. Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. (pp. 29-36).

References --Teslawlo (talk) 19:39, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

You've made significant improvements to what was there before. Just a few comments now.

1. Even though you have a section labeled "Causes", the discussion of causes of social loafing is distributed in many places in the article. E.g., the discussion of Latane, Williams and Harkins "three possible causes" . I'd suggest consolidating.
2. The section on causes should try to explain the Karau and William's collective effort model. This meta-analysis both summarizes the conditions under which social loafing is stronger and provides a theory that seem to account for these results. For example, the current article doesn't indicate that social loafing is decreased when people like their group. Nor does it provide an explanation of why this occurs. liking for the group, expectations of co-workers' performance,
3. You might want to create subsections of the cause section, with a several sentence description of each cause and some indicate of the type of evidence -- e.g., identifiability of individual performance, uniqueness of individaul inputs, expectations for others' performance, liking for the task, task complexity, liking for the group, group performance standards, culture and gender.
4. The discussion of "advanced metatheoretical assumptions: Ontological Assumptions, Epistemological Assumptions, Axiological Assumptions" will incomprehensible to an average reader? Is it needed?
5. A more accessable reference to the original Ringelman paper is Kravitz, David A., and Barbara Martin. 1986. Ringelmann rediscovered: The original article. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 50 (5):936-941.
6. When discussing the original Ringleman paper, you should be clear that the original research couldn't distinguish effort from coordination effects. In your discussion of contemporary research, you should indicate how modern research disentagled these two causes of the creased perfomance in groups. I suggest summarizing one of Latane's experiments, e.g., Williams, K., S.G. Harkins, and B. Latane. 1981. Identifiability as a deterrant to social loafing: Two cheering experiments. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 40 (2):303-311.
7. The section on cultural differences in social loafing (which is also indicated in Karau and William's meta-analysis is good. But it seems to occur two early in the article.

Robertekraut (talk) 15:22, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Some suggestions

I haven't the time to review this article for GA, but I've put a call out to Wikiproject Psychology for reviewers. I can offer some suggestions, though, that will make the GA process a bit easier.

• My first impressions: reliable sourcing, no apparent point-of-view pushing, a stable article with largely the right tone: the core qualities are good.
• for such a large article, the lead is quote short. Summarise more of the article in the lead and get the reader more excited about reading the full article. See WP:LEAD.
• Motivation strategies and Coordination strategies are two lists that appear at the end of the article. They are tantalising and suggest they need more explanation. They need to be worked into the narrative of the article, not under their own headings, e.g. [source] identifies the following strategies as effective at promoting motivation; then give the list (and explain any technical terms), then end it with a reference to the source(s).
• Wikipedia "runs very effective fundraising campaigns": not encyclopedic because it's an evaluation. A more neutral way to make the point would be to say that its fundraising campaigns involve tens of thousands of people, or raise millions of dollars.
• Encyclopedias try to avoid first-person language ("we").
• This is quite an important one: Psychology isn't about psychologists primarily, so it's not important to have the researchers' names in the headings. In fact it can be distracting. "Kraut & Resnick: Encouraging Contributions in Online Communities" should be "Encouraging contributions in online communities". (Note the capitalisation).

MartinPoulter (talk) 15:47, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

In response to the above suggestions

Thank you for your comments. We have increased the size of the lead summary, edited the Wikipedia fundraising campaign mention, removed first-person language, and revised the researchers' names in the headings.

Teslawlo (talk) 04:03, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Nice work! The article's coming along really well. MartinPoulter (talk) 13:11, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Social loafing/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: MartinPoulter (talk) 21:44, 6 May 2011 (UTC) I have made minor edits to this article before but do not consider myself a significant contributor.

I think the text is very good but the structure is confusing and there are sentences which need to be rephrased for Wikipedia's general audience. I'll make some changes and then give a more detailed review. This is a quality piece of work, and the language is often admirably clear, but for a GA review I necessarily have to focus on ways the article can be improved.

"One weakness in the research of Ringelmann was that the research could not distinguish between effort from coordination effects." This needs spelling out. "Coordination effects" have not been defined. Make it so that someone completely new to the topic of psychology can understand it. (P.S. Co-ordination is mentioned in the lede, so I'm being a bit pedantic here, but the word "co-ordination" is being used in a technical sense which will be unfamiliar to general readers, so it's worth having a few extra words to spell this meaning out MartinPoulter (talk) 09:52, 9 May 2011 (UTC))

"In a 1993 meta-analysis study by Karau and Williams, they propose the Collective Effort Model (CEM), which is used to generate predictions for the meta-analysis that is subsequently conducted.[3] The CEM integrates expectancy theories with theories of group-level social comparison and social identity to account for studies that examine individual effort in collective settings. From a psychological state, it proposes that Expectancy multiplied by Instrumentality multiplied by Valence of Outcome produces the resulting Motivational Force." - a confusing paragraph. What is the first sentence trying to say? What are expectancy theories? They haven't been defined. How can you "multiply by" a valence, or by instrumentality? Are they measurable quantities? Is there an equation that needs to be spelled out? The next paragraph is better, but could perhaps be simplified.

"meta-analysis study" seems redundant. Why not just "meta-analysis"? Also, meta-analysis of what: how many studies were used?

The "student interactions..." and "Encouraging contributions..." sections look like they address the mitigation of social loafing, and so belong in the final section. I've been bold and moved them myself. Still open to other ways of structuring the article.

Black Hawk shootdown incident: does the Snook reference explicitly use the term "social loafing", or is the connection of the incident to this article a piece of original research? Page numbers for where he invokes a social loafing explanation would be welcome. I've confirmed that Snook does use the social loafing term and cite the Latane paper.

MartinPoulter (talk) 21:44, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

The changingminds.org reference: I like the Changing Minds site, but blogs aren't suitable sources for Wikipedia because anyone can publish anything on a blog. Find the research that the blog is summarising and cite that instead. Removed the ref, since it didn't match up with preceding sentence.

There seems to be a lot of further reading. Some of these readings are already mentioned in the references: are they all recommended further reading? Been bold and trimmed it myself.

More details of the Blackburn ref (ISBN, page number) would be welcome but are not essential: would be good to make it easy for other people to check this text themselves. I replaced this with another ref.

Social facilitation needs a mention in the body text, not just as a see also link. We could do with a couple of sentences to distinguish when facilitation occurs rather than loafing.

Is the Kraut and Resnick ref definitely about social loafing? I can see how it's related, but the connection of that section to the topic of the article isn't clear from the start.

I'll be away from the computer for a couple of days after this. MartinPoulter (talk) 23:04, 6 May 2011 (UTC) Aaaand I'm back. MartinPoulter (talk) 09:33, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

What's the status on this review? Been a while since any comments. If the original review notes haven't been addressed by now the article should probably be failed. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 15:47, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it seems the educational project which led to the article overhaul has finished, and the student authors aren't around to follow it up. In light of the way a central source (Karau and Williams) is poorly explained and summarised, I can't in all conscience call it a GA, but it's very near and with another chunk of work it could be a GA in future. MartinPoulter (talk) 10:08, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

As a criticism of Socialism?

Should Socialism be mentioned in this article? Under Criticisms of socialism#Reduced_incentives, this phenomenon is discussed yet it is not named. I think this phenomenon should at least be mentioned in the Criticisms of Socialism article. Urumia (talk) 19:20, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions for Improving this topic

Overall, this page was great and it explained social loafing thoroughly. However, I think one good way to show this theory is to explain how it relates to college or mainly educational environments. I know that when many students are assigned group work, there always seems to be this thought that we (each individual) needs to work less because there are more people. If this article talked about how social loafing can be seen in education, it would help improve the authenticity of this topic.Zbanihani14 (talk) 01:37, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Merging Zamanfou into Social loafing

The Zamanfou article covers the Social loafing phenomenon within Greek society. Thing is the article is pretty bad and its unlikely to improve in the future since even on Greek WP Zamanfou has been merged into the respective Social loafing article. I therefore propose incorporating what little info can be salvaged from Zamanfou into Social loafing.--Catlemur (talk) 20:44, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Support TortillaDePapas (talk) 18:16, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Oppose:

• the article before it was neutered by dionyziz into a mere dictionary entry portrays Zamanfou as a conscious political stance of opposition, not a mere unconscious psychological effect similar to the bystander effect. making a political stance you disagree with go away just because you don't like it isn't very NPOV.
  • "Greece has been in financial and social dissolution in the mid-1970s. Greek society, then, freshly out of the Regime of the Colonels and not having yet fully recovered from the years of the Greek Civil War, had to deal with the burden of an increasing burocracy in the public sector, conservatism and a petite bourgeoisie mindset. The result of this dystopia was a generation of young Greek citizens that chose to prioritize their individual well being, over working as a whole. This individualism came in many forms: Cheating on their taxes, dodging the draft, destroying their credit, destroying public and private property, having total disregard for most of the common law, "screw the rest of the world" mentality, etc. It is thought thought of as a form of insubordination against the state and the Greek status quo, both on a conscious and an unconscious level. Due to Zamanfou, as of 2006, the cohesiveness of the Greek society has greatly deteriorated." from 2006
• alternatively, it might be understood as merely an idiomatic slang phrase or hand gesture, in which case being dumped into an article about psychology is also not helpful.
• if an article is in a bad state, it is not a reason to merge it.
• i'll never figure out this wikitext formatting stuff. fix my indentation if you care 157.131.95.172 (talk) 08:31, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

Oppose. It has unique cultural context that would be inappropriate to describe in detail in this article (it should probably mention it) but which makes it notable in its own right and therefore deserving of an article. It's classic WP:MINORASPECT. --Xurizuri (talk) 05:28, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Closing, with no merge, given the unopposed opposition with stale discussion. Klbrain (talk) 10:36, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

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