While we were going over the effect of group influence in class, I couldn’t help but connect back to my past experiences. In one of the courses I’ve taken earlier in college, the class had a choice to do a project alone or in a group with a maximum of three people. I was taking the class with a friend of mine, so we chose to work together along with another student who sat near us.

I found out pretty quickly that I would’ve been better off doing the project by myself. The social loafing phenomenon made it so that no one in the group did much work until two weeks before the project was due. We coordinated the work and even met up twice, but we were still scrambling at the end to have our project completed.

Social loafing is the tendency for an individual in a group to exert less effort toward attaining a common goal, like completing a project, than when tested individually. I know that if I had chosen to do the project myself, I would have felt much more pressure to get my work done well ahead of time. The fact that I was in a group made it so that I did not feel the pressure to have the project completed alone. I thought that because he work could be divided evenly between all members of the group, I really did not have to do much. We could all get it done in less time if we all focused on it. In the end, I realized that I was very wrong about this assumption.

I took that experience with me, especially for classes that require a group project. I make sure to get as much work done as early in possible in a group, even if it ends up being just myself doing the work early on. That lightens the workload and allows for a much better project overall. When possible, I choose to do the project by myself, just because I know I can spread out the project over time to get it completed to my standards.