Many Hands Make Light the Work¶
Latané, B., Williams, K., & Harkins, S. (1979). Many Hands Make Light the Work: The Causes and Consequences of Social Loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(6), 822-832.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Responsibility Diffusion
- The signature separates formal coverage (on paper, all responsible) from psychological motivation (in practice, none feel responsible) and names the work required to reconnect them, a mechanism Latané, Williams, and Harkins (1979) demonstrated quantitatively in their "many hands make light work" social-loafing experiments.
This sourceDemonstrates the distributed-obligation-to-reduced-motivation pattern in shouting and clapping tasks; per-person effort declines as group size grows even with no coordination loss.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The abstract states that individual effort drops in groups beyond coordination loss, backing the motivational mechanism but not the word 'quantitatively' or the responsibility-diffusion framing.
“This decrease, which we call social loafing, is in addition to losses due to faulty coordination of group efforts.”
- The signature separates formal coverage (on paper, all responsible) from psychological motivation (in practice, none feel responsible) and names the work required to reconnect them, a mechanism Latané, Williams, and Harkins (1979) demonstrated quantitatively in their "many hands make light work" social-loafing experiments.
Mechanisms¶
- Volunteer or Maintenance Rota
- It is also vulnerable to social loafing — the well-documented tendency to slack when individual effort is submerged in a group and can't be told apart — which is exactly why coverage tracking matters, but also why over-tracking backfires.
This sourceDocuments social loafing as reduced individual effort in groups when a person's contribution is less distinguishable and consequential.
- It is also vulnerable to social loafing — the well-documented tendency to slack when individual effort is submerged in a group and can't be told apart — which is exactly why coverage tracking matters, but also why over-tracking backfires.
Verification¶
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Registry ID ref:66d0b0af3c7f · see in the full table