Social Loafing
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Does Group Mentality Impair Helpfulness Due to Social Loafing?
Individuals in group settings are often less likely to exhibit helping behavior than if they were alone or with one other person. This phenomenon, often called "social loafing", can be attributed to the individual feeling less influential within a group, or because a group provides many other individuals to diffuse the responsibility of helping upon. It has been supported that an individual must not necessarily be in a group at the moment to exhibit decreased helpfulness due to social loafing, but mere suggestion of a group situation before an opportunity for helpfulness is sufficient enough to create a decreased helpfulness response.
Garcia and Weaver (2002) displays this phenomenon. These studies show that participants who were primed to think of themselves in a group situation (at a theater with a group of friends or strangers) pledged significantly less money to charity compared to participants primed to think of themselves as alone (in a theater by themselves and one other person).
It is anticipated that a replication of this study, using Gettysburg College psychology students and a different assessment of decreased helpfulness due to social loafing will produce similar results. It is hypothesized that the group of participants primed to think of themselves in a group will display significantly less helping behavior, characterized by fewer responses on an easy or difficult task, than a group of participants primed to think of themselves in a solitary situation.
Method
Participants
Participants consisted of a Gettysburg College psychology methods class. Participants were randomly grouped into two groups: a "single/individual scenario" group, and a "group scenario" group...