Social Loafing

Some research has shown that when people are working together in a group, they will tend to invest less effort, individually, than they would have working solo.

The social psychological term to describe this tendency is “social loafing,” and research into it began in the late-19th century when one of the original social psychologists started conducting experiments into laborers and how much they exerted themselves on various tasks, both solo and with other laborers.

The general finding was that across essentially any task they could measure, folks exerted themselves less when they were working with others, and it was determined (though this would be hard to prove for certain for a variety of reasons) that these laborers generally weren’t aware they were reducing their effort in this way: it just kind of happened once a large enough number of other laborers (that number varying from task to task) were involved.