Social Loafing and Self-Evaluation With a Social Standard

Social loafing has been described as the phenomenon in which participants who work together generate less effort than do participants who work alone (e.g., Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Subsequent research (Harkins & Jackson, 1985; Williams, Harkins, & Latane, 1981) has shown that a particular aspect of this paradigm leads to the loafing effect. When participants "work together," their outputs are pooled (combined) so that evaluation of individual output is not possible. In those studies, the evaluation potential of the experimenter has been emphasized. However, when the experimenter could not evaluate individual outputs, neither could the participants evaluate themselves. In this study we tested the possibility that the opportunity for the participants to evaluate themselves would be sufficient to eliminate the loafing effect. In two experiments, the evaluation potential of the experimenter (experimenter evaluation vs. no experimenter evaluation) was crossed with the potential for self-evaluation (self-evaluation vs. no self-evaluation). In both experiments, consistent with previous loafing research, the potential for evaluation by the experimenter was sufficient to increase motivation, whether participants could self-evaluate or not. However, when the experimenter could not evaluate the participants' outputs, the potential for self-evaluation reliably improved participant performance. In fact, self-evaluation was the only motivation needed for participants to exert as much effort as that exhibited by participants who could be evaluated by the experimenter.