What I was interested about when we were talking about social loafing in the lecture was the fact that so many people can relate to it there’s so many examples of this phenomena happening. Social Loafing is when people are in a group they are more likely to slack off and not work as hard than if they were working alone.  Because they are in a group each person believes that someone else will work harder or pick up the slack of the rest of the group. There have been many studies that show how social loafing makes people who are working in these groups use exceedingly less effort than if they were working alone. In the example of group projects this goes away if you add in some factors like; peer reviews of how much work they did, or if they are responsible for a specific area in the project and will be graded due to their own personal performance. Once these factors go in then they are responsible for their own part of the grade and they cannot rely on the others to get them the grade they want.

Other than group projects I have also seen this in my life when I did a philanthropy where you worked in a group and did completed a few physical tasks in a competition. Groups had to do a three legged race, limbo, jousting, and tug of war. What I noticed in the groups was that you could tell by watching who wasn’t trying as hard as the others in pulling this rope. It got to the point where the teams that you would assume would have won got cut out because they all thought the biggest guy would do the brunt of the work. But because they were not working as a team they all would fall over. The other members of the team had this mentality of social loafing and didn’t try as hard as they would if it was just them pulling the rope because they assumed that someone else was going to pull them to victory. And that was their flaw in the games.