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., Latané, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Subsequent research (Harkins & Jackson, 1985; Williams, Harkins, & Latané, 1981) has shown that a particular aspect of this paradigm leads to the loafing effect. 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 2 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). 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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)