Throwing Away Trash
Social Loafing and Throwing Away Trash
Social loafing occurs when people work together and when their “output” is combined leaving no one to feel solely accountable for the completed task. Social loafing occurs on many different types of tasks including ones requiring physical effort (Szymanski & Harkins, 1987). Due to social loafing effect we hypothesized that people in groups would leave behind more trash then groups of one to two people. We wanted to see if larger groups left more trash thinking that either they would not be held accountable for it, or that their friends would pick up their slack. In a clapping experiment it was found that identifiability is a key aspect to social loafing which we believed would come into play during this experiment (Williams, Harkins, & Latané, 1981). Our hypothesis was that groups of three or more people will leave more trash then individuals in correlation with social loafing.
Methods
We conducted our observational experiment in the Cafeteria at Sierra College, Rocklin …show more content…
Out of 40 people observed only 7 people left trash and 4 of them sat together. I feel like our sample size was too small and we did not observe enough littering to have a statistically significant finding. To improve our experiment, it should be tried again but instead of one hour of observation, maybe it should be increased to an hour or two a day over a week’s span, or multiple locations to make it more generalizable. Because of social loafing, where members of a group have a tendency to exert less effort than if working alone under the assumption that others will pick up their slack or cover them, we thought that people would leave trash behind when in a group. Although this was the case at one table, for the most part everyone picked up their trash when they
Social loafing occurs when people work together and when their “output” is combined leaving no one to feel solely accountable for the completed task. Social loafing occurs on many different types of tasks including ones requiring physical effort (Szymanski & Harkins, 1987). Due to social loafing effect we hypothesized that people in groups would leave behind more trash then groups of one to two people. We wanted to see if larger groups left more trash thinking that either they would not be held accountable for it, or that their friends would pick up their slack. In a clapping experiment it was found that identifiability is a key aspect to social loafing which we believed would come into play during this experiment (Williams, Harkins, & Latané, 1981). Our hypothesis was that groups of three or more people will leave more trash then individuals in correlation with social loafing.
Methods
We conducted our observational experiment in the Cafeteria at Sierra College, Rocklin …show more content…
Out of 40 people observed only 7 people left trash and 4 of them sat together. I feel like our sample size was too small and we did not observe enough littering to have a statistically significant finding. To improve our experiment, it should be tried again but instead of one hour of observation, maybe it should be increased to an hour or two a day over a week’s span, or multiple locations to make it more generalizable. Because of social loafing, where members of a group have a tendency to exert less effort than if working alone under the assumption that others will pick up their slack or cover them, we thought that people would leave trash behind when in a group. Although this was the case at one table, for the most part everyone picked up their trash when they