Ever had teammates or partners in a group project that would slack off so much that you had to pull all of the team’s weight? This relates to the psychological concept of social loafing where people tend to slack off or work less hard in group setting when they feel as though their team will do most or all of the work for them. As more people are in a group, the effort put in of each member usually decreases. If other people in the group or on the team seem as though they have great ability or can do most of the work themselves or with another person in the group, then the other person or people in the group will rely heavily on their contribution and worry less about their own. People also tend to perform social loafing in order to not be the person that is the victim of it and do all the work themselves while the others do not do as much to help.
Social loafing occurs often in my life as it does in many other people’s lives. This is because it is common to work in groups for either school, work, or even sports. One area I can especially relate to this concept is working in group projects for school. I would often get assigned groups in school in which my other partners either weren’t hardworking students, or just did not feel like putting in enough effort. This was very aggravating as I would get no help when working on the project even though that is the point of group work in the first place. There was one time where I had a project and the other people in my group were not even willing to meet up to work on the project together which was an extreme case of social loafing. This is why individual work encourages people to work harder than group work because if they don’t put in effort then the project won’t get done, whereas in a group they can rely on others to do the work most of the time.
https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/socialpsychology/n538.xml
Social loafing happens much more often in groups than we’d like to think. I was a cheerleader in high school and while we would stunt, our coach was basically explaining social loafing with out even realizing. In a stunt group, she would say that just because you are in a group doesn’t mean you all don’t have to put in 100%. After the class we learned this in, I had an “Aha” moment. I thought about how my coach was actually right after all. I also think that we as Americans are social loafing when it comes to climate change. Many think “eh there’s so many people in the world, someone else will do it.” But if everyone is saying that, the work doesn’t get done. I think more people need to learn about social learning so that we can teach people how to not do it. We should start teaching kids this so when they grow up, they won’t even think to slack off as much.
I totally agree that social loafing relates to our climate change problem. It is true that people think that because there are so many people in the world, the issue would be solved by somebody else. However, I also think that there is another social phenomenon at play here. Specifically, it is the idea that there are so many people in the world that your individual actions would not matter. Even if you did try to solve the crisis, how much change could you actually make? I think that this is another reason for social loafing, especially in situations where a lot of people are working towards a common goal. For example, I often hesitate to take actions in regard to my fraternity because I think that my voice, relative to the 50 other members in my fraternity, would not be heard or matter. This is why, in my opinion, group projects should be limited to 3 or 4 people if they are to be implemented at all.