Suppose that you and several other people are helping to push a stalled truck. Some people will push hard to push a truck. Others will push moderately. Some may hang on and pretend to be pushing when they are not. This is a demonstration of Social Loafing.
Social loafing is the manifestation of reduced motivation and effort that occur when individuals work collectively in a group compared to when they work individually as independent co-actors. Social psychologists refer to such effects as ‘social loafing’ .
Findings on social loafing
Social loafing has been demonstrated in many experiments. The effects appear among both genders and children as well as adults. Women may be slightly less likely to show this effect than men, perhaps because they tend to be higher than men in concerns for others’ welfare. Social loafing effects do not seem to occur in collectivistic cultures, such as those in many Asian countries. In such cultures, people seem to work harder when in groups then they do when alone. In fact, in such cultures people work harder in groups than they do by themselves. In Asian countries the collective good is more highly valued than individual accomplishment or achievement. The study concludes that social loafing appears to be a pervasive fact of social life.
Reducing Social Loafing
The first and most obvious way of reducing social loafing involve making the output or effort of each participant readily identifiable. Group members’ commitment to task performance can also reduce social loafers. Social loafing can be reduced by increasing the apparent importance and value of the task, they add. Together, these steps can reduce social loafing – and the temptation to goof at the expense of others.
Theory of Correspondent Inference was developed by Jones and Davis (1965) It is concerned with how we decide based on others’ overt actions.
People often act in certain ways not because that is what they feel to do, but rather because external factors force them to act that way. For example, a customer acting rudely towards a salesperson in a store may be the exception, not the rule. In situations such as these, using others’ behavior as a guide to their lasting traits or motives can lead to a wrong judgment of their behavior.
According to Jones and Davis’s theory, we can learn more about others from actions on their part that yield non-common effects than from ones that do not. Non-common effects are effects that are caused by one specific factor but not by others. They allow us to zero in on the causes of other’s behavior. The theory suggests we focus on behavior that seems to have been chosen very freely, while largely ignoring ones that were somehow forced on the person in question. It also suggests that we pay careful attention to actions that show non-common effects, such as a rich man marrying a rich woman who is boring.
Jones and Davis: We learn more about others’ traits form the actions they perform that are somehow out of the ordinary than form actions that are very much like those of most other persons.
Every aspect of human behavior passes through a pattern of development resulting in changes as the individual grows from childhood to adulthood. Emotions are not an exception. The basic developmental process is common in a general way for all individuals.
McDougall’s concept of emotions as being part of an instinctual process. According to this view, instincts and emotions were both innate patterns. For a long time, it was widely believed that emotional behavior was essentially inherited.
John Watson identified fear, anger, and love as three basic emotions. Fear could be aroused by a loud noise or loss of bodily support. rage by the restriction of bodily movements. Love by the stimulation of certain sensitive zones of the body.
M.C. Jones and the Shermans found that young infants did show a general pattern of excitement irrespective of the stimulus. This generalized pattern later got differentiated into different forms of familiar emotional behavior. In certain cultural groups, people are capable of a large number of emotional experiences. In other societies the number of different emotional experiences is smaller. It has been estimated that the English language has at least four hundred words to describe emotional experiences.
A classical attempt in the study of the development of emotions was made by Katherine Bridges who observed children concerning their emotional behavior. Bridges concluded that the newborn child exhibits a general pattern of excitement which, within the first three months, gets differentiated into distress and delight. By the time the child is two years old, it is found to be capable of experiencing and expressing a large number of pleasant and unpleasant emotions.
Different investigators have given different lists:
Woodword, in 1938, proposed the list of emotions which include love (mirth and happiness), surprise, fear, anger, and disgust (contempt).
Frijda (1968) proposed the list of emotions as happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust, calm, bitterness, pride, irony, insecurity, and skepticism.