Social Loafing and Group Evaluation

Recent work (e.g., Harkins, 1987; Szymanski & Harkins, 1987) has suggested that social loafing occurs because participants' outputs cannot be evaluated by the experimenter, by the coactors, or by the participants themselves. This analysis has focused on the output of the individual, but in loafing research, participants work together to produce a group product. However, in this prior work participants have been unable to make anything of this group product, because no standard of comparison has been made available. Several recent formulations (e.g., Goethals & Darley, 1987) have suggested that the potential for group evaluation could motivate performance. Testing this hypothesis in 2 experiments, 1 using an optimizing task and the other a maximizing task, we found that providing a standard that allowed the "group" to evaluate its performance eliminated the loafing effect. The implications of these findings for current theories of group evaluation are discussed.