Now that SING! is over, I'm willing to take some time to analyze some of the events that happened during our numerous practices. One concept that seems to stick out to me when I think about SING! is that of social loafing. Social loafing occurs when individuals in a group exert less effort than they would if they were performing the task alone (Latane et al., 1979). For those of you who did not perform in or attend SING!, the Tri Delta routine involved groups of girls performing dance routines to various one-hit wonder songs of the past. One particular group was having a difficult time with a choreographed move and repetition was not improving their performance. Wisely, one of the dance leaders asked each girl to perform the move on her own. Almost instantly, each move was perfected upon her request. It seems that, by dancing in a group, each girl did not put forth as much effort into perfecting her dance moves as she would have with a solo dance. By requiring each girl to essentially perform a solo, the girls contributed a more appropriate amount of effort to the task of a synchronized dance. Our SING! performance also involved singing by members of the chapter who were not dancing during the skits. As usual, we were having trouble ensuring that everyone knew the lyrics and that each performer was singing at an appropriate volume. Once again, the girls were required to sing the songs individually. This seemed to remind the girls of how much they could contribute individually and our performance benefited from this. Although it was not a very popular move, singling out individuals to remind them not to engage in social loafing improved their output and our group benefited from the contributions made by each individual.
Latane, 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, 822-832.
3 years ago
3 comments:
It seems that making each person's performance identifiable and making each person accountable definitely increased their motivation to exert effort, which also decreased social loafing. I definitely would not want to be singled out with all the attention on me, so the mere risk of possibly being embarrassed would motivate me to sing and dance!
I think something else that could have been going on was deindividuation, to a certain extent (without the deviant action part, unless there were some of those? haha). I think that the girls as a group felt as if they were unidentifiable as a group, especially if they were wearing the same clothes. However, I'm inclined to agree that social loafing was the primary force as work here. I know for sure that social loafing was happening in a lot of other skits as well and it was really frustrating to a lot of the SING! leaders.
We did something similar during our SING! practices as well. During our technical rehearsal, it was brought to our attention the the back rows were watching the front row and relying on them too much for choreography. So at our final rehearsal before the show, each row had to perform the entire skit individually. It showed the girls in the back that they did know what they were doing and that they could contribute just as much as the front row!
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