Andrew: 0:00

We want you to pull on the rope as hard as you can on your own. And you go, okay, right. I'm on my own pulling rope. And then they say, Okay, we're going to do it with two people now. And they had someone, a kind of imposter, stand behind you. And you're still blindfolded. Yeah, and make grunting noises, essentially. Okay, Mark, there's two of you pulling now, go. And someone's going, oh, oh, behind you.

Mark Ridley: 0:44

Right, Andrew, are you ready for a little bit of myth busting

Andrew: 0:47

Mythbusting, history, journey, whatever you want to call it. I'm, I'm ready.

Mark Ridley: 0:52

so have you heard of the Ringelmann effect?

Andrew: 0:54

I am aware of the Ringelmann effect.

Mark Ridley: 0:57

Ringelmann effect, and sometimes Ringelmann effect is called social loafing, um, but they're different, and, and I'm really guilty of this. I wrote an article probably 10 years ago now talking about what's the perfect team size. And one of the things that I put into that article was a really brief explanation of what the Ringelmann effect was, and then went straight into social loafing In the work that we've been doing, going back and sort of pulling threads on, on some of these things, I, I started to go back and I realized, as, as actually with our Tuckman work, I realized that I'd never read the original paper. I wanted to go and find out what Ringman was talking about. If you go into Wikipedia, there is a statement. In the Wikipedia article right at the top, if you look for the Ringelmann effect, it says, According to Ringelmann, 1913, groups fail to reach their full potential because various interpersonal processes detract from the group's overall proficiency. Namely, two distinct processes have been identified as potential sources for the reduced productivity of groups, loss of motivation, and coordination problems. So that seems totally reasonable. So we're saying, in 1913, there was some really good research that suggested that. If you're in a group, uh, the individual effort in the group is reduced, and it's reduced for two reasons. One is loss of coordination, and the other one is loss of motivation. The really fascinating thing, if you can find a copy of the original Ringelmann paper, which is in French, he doesn't say anything about motivation. under the hood of this, there's some really interesting parallels with, with Tuckman and actually with, um, Frederick Winslow Taylor in, in that Ringelmann was doing something very, very specific, which was then sort of collided with later research. when people talk about the Ringelmann effect, they talk about social loafing.

Andrew: 2:40

Yeah, And mentioning that the last episode we recorded with the guest with, uh, Dr. Gemma Quinn, she talked about her continuous experience with social loafing. With student teams in team based learning, and it comes up again and again, doesn't it? In fact, if you do the sort of down the pub chat with someone about teamwork, which, you know, I sometimes find myself in those kinds of chats because you say, Oh, so what do you do? So I'm a researcher. I work on teamwork and communication. Oh yeah. Teams. Like the problem is that it's just getting everyone to pull their weight, it's fascinating that even that little kind of shorthand for people contributing to teamwork. It goes back to Ringelmann's work, doesn't it?

Mark Ridley: 3:34

it does and and hopefully what we can do today. I'm going to do the Ringelmann stuff But I think I hand over to you at a point where

Andrew: 3:41

that's just,

Mark Ridley: 3:42

and that's

Andrew: 3:42

just you not pulling your weight, frankly. You're just going to hand over to me.

Mark Ridley: 3:47

Yeah, yeah i'm i'm

Andrew: 3:48

Yeah.

Mark Ridley: 3:49

my way through the second half of this episode

Andrew: 3:51

Right, well, we'll take like,

Mark Ridley: 3:52

you are

Andrew: 3:53

talking of pulling weight, tell us about Ringelmann.

Mark Ridley: 3:56

So, I went off and I tried to, I first tried to find the Ringelmann paper, um, not realizing that it's linked in the Wikipedia article that I was criticizing anyway, um, but, And it's quite difficult to find, and the original article is in French, it was written in 1913. I actually found another article called Ringelmann Rediscovered, which was by Kravitz and Martin, David Kravitz and Barbara Martin. And this is what sort of inspired me to go back and look much more deeply at Ringelmann and pull the original article. Because they did a really, really nice breakdown of what Ringelmann had actually said. what I want to do is actually tell you a little bit about Ringelmann. We'll go through the history of what he did. So max Ringelmann wasn't German. Some, some later people have said he was a German psychologist. He wasn't. He was a French, Agricultural academic and so he was he was active actually he did the original research that he then cited in his 1913 paper Between I think it was 1881 and 1887 So he was working at, um, a very, renowned French agricultural school at Grand Jouan in Brittany.

Andrew: 5:05

the original, because the original research, what, he didn't publish it, did he? I mean, he published in 1913, but the, the actual research wasn't published. It's a nice example of

Mark Ridley: 5:16

so,

Andrew: 5:17

just because it's not been published doesn't mean it's not useful.

Mark Ridley: 5:21

yeah, exactly right. He, he published something, I think, in 19, 1907, but the paper that's always cited is 1913. So he, so he was at the point that his. his 1913 paper was published. He was a professor of rural engineering, or what we might think of a professor of agricultural engineering, at the National Agronomic Institute of France. He was a director with the machine testing station and a member of the really highly regarded French National Society of Agriculture. So that's, that's who Ringelmann was. So you get a sense, he's not doing psychological research. He's, he's looking at something else. And fundamentally, that's what he was doing, much like F. W. Taylor. Ringelmann fascinated by trying to make more productive. So, so turning some, some sort of motivation into some sort of outcome. And the tests that he was doing at this, um, the agricultural school of Grand Jouan is, um, testing, pulling and pushing. Ringelmann really didn't seem to care whether the Pulling and pushing was done by, an ox, oxen or horses or other agricultural students. so the big Ringelmann paper that he published was actually, uh, him getting some of his fellow students, because this was the 1881 to 87 period, he got some of his fellow students to pull and push heavy objects in the field. And that's the original, the original part of the Ringelmann paper. his explanation, Ringelmann's explanation in the 1913 paper, he was obviously writing this long after the research was done. He said, this is his words, and forgive the translation, this is from the French, regarding the work of humans, our tests were mainly carried out from 1882 to 1887 in Grand Jouan on the students who kindly agreed to participate in the research. 26 series of experiments, repeated on the same day on the same 20 students from Grand Jouan took place in 1883 and helped establish relationships between different modes of action of the same engines what he means by engines is the people so you can see

Andrew: 7:28

Yeah, I love, I love, because does he not call it like an animated engine?

Mark Ridley: 7:34

yeah actually that is the subject that the the original title is research on animated engines human labor

Andrew: 7:43

You know,

Mark Ridley: 7:44

fantastic.

Andrew: 7:44

when I hear that, I'm like, it's kind of a good name for a team. It's, we're an, it's an animated engine.

Mark Ridley: 7:55

Yeah, it's perfect. Maybe we should call this the animated engine craft podcast. So he then went on to say, these are the results of the 26 series that constitute the main subject of this memoir, I would, we're going to put this in the show notes, but I would definitely recommend having a look at that rediscovery paper, because it actually goes through the evidence that was collected and demonstrated by, by Ringelmann. But if we, if we actually break down what he did, what he was actually looking at doing was putting. individuals and teams together to push and pull a number of things, sometimes in harnesses and sometimes with shafts. So he was effectively trying to find out what is the most effective way to apply mechanical force to an object so that I can make agricultural work more, more effective. The finding that he, he had, and this is where the Wikipedia summary is half right, the finding that he had, but the only finding that he had was that When teams were working together, the individual contribution was reduced. So that's, that's what he found. And his theory as to why that happened that he proposed was the difficulty in coordination. And clearly that's really, really important. And he, he wasn't, there's this suggestion that Ringelmann Um, put forward that it was a motivation issue. There is a slight hint of that in his paper, but that's it. He, he almost says, yeah, we, we did find this situation. And this was actually where he was working with prisoners. And again, he's writing this in 1913 paper of work that he did previously. But there was, there was one situation where he was, uh, actually studying a, uh, a human powered mill. prisoners pushing around the outside. And he kind of alluded to the fact that there might have been a motivational problem, but that's not what his 1913 paper was talking about. The, the specific quote from his paper was, When several engines work simultaneously on the same piece, the usable effort of each is lower, despite the same level of fatigue, than if the engines worked separately. So again, engines are humans, and what he's saying is that when you have multiple people working on the same task together, their individual effort is lower than it would be if you measured it on their own. And that's what he did. He effectively was measuring the mechanical power that was exerted by people. And he was very careful to control. This was given that this was in the 19th century. He was very careful to control for fatigue and moving people around different experiments. So he took care in, in what he was doing. He said, we have seen that this is due to the lack of simultaneity of muscle contractions of the individuals paired on the same resistance. It's very clear what he's looking at. When two men operate a machine using cranks, it's also noted that the practically usable power does not reach the sum of the individual powers that each man can deliver, even though they turn the crank the same number of times per unit of time. the same is true for animals harnessed in a circular track. So, you know, anybody that's suggesting this is a human motivation issue, he's explicitly saying, The experiment that I've just run the same is true of horses. It's exactly the same as true

Andrew: 11:08

So it's it's very simple in a sense. It's very simple in that it's like, if I'm in a group of people, and we're asked to push something. thRingelmannan effect in a nutshell is the more people that are in the group, the less each individual actually pushes. So the, if I, if I push my, I'll push my hardest when I'm on my own. If you add one other person, I'll push a little bit less hard. If you add another two people, I'll push even less hard.

Mark Ridley: 11:42

let me, let me just dive into that because that's, that's not quite what Ringelmann was saying. He wasn't necessarily saying that the individual pushed less hard. He was saying that the outcome of the effort was less. And what he was proposing was that the outcome of the effort was less. Not, not that they tried any harder or less hard because there are other people there. Very specifically, what he said was, we measure less force individual, the larger the group gets. And actually he did it with, I think, uh, one individual, and then groups of increasing numbers, I think up to up to eight. And so he was, he actually, his, his charts, his data actually showed the decreasing effort as, as the groups increased. But what he was specifically saying was, it is hard to coordinate the effort of those individuals and the lack of coordination, not the lack of effort. So it might still be the same, you had the same input effort, but the output that was measured was less because of coordination. So he wasn't actually suggesting that the, the effort was lower. He was saying that the output was lower.

Andrew: 12:49

There's overall output. Which is, which you then divide down and you establish that if effort is X on your own, or if output is X when you're on your own, the overall output divided by the amount of people is X minus something when, when there's more than one person. It's interesting, even that is. An example of how way in which the story travels through time, I've just done, I've just done that mistake. I've, I've, the, you mentioned the Ringelmann effect is, you know, loss coordination and motivation. Um, the original research was done on the, the, the difference between output between individuals and then, uh, increasing groups of people. I immediately interpreted that as. All that tells me that they're not working as hard, which is not, you know, it's not strictly, as you say, it's not strictly what he established in his work.

Mark Ridley: 13:51

That's exactly right. And that's why it's important to reflect on the fact that he really didn't care if he was measuring oxen or horses or beasts of burden or machines, because at that point, this was the era that steam engines were starting to, um, to take over from the work of, um, of, of animals and people. if you go back and look at the research, he was, there's another point in there where he was saying, the, the previous efforts are weaker than those obtained from work with a traverse or a shaft, even when the man pulls partly with his arms acting on the shafts and partly with the harness. This is due in our opinion to the fact that the man working on the shaft is forced to subject his arm to a torsion of 90 degrees so that the metacarpals apply themselves to the handle. He's going in to the, the physical. details of how to make the engine more effective. And, and as, at that point where he said, this is exactly the same thing that we would witness with horses, done, and quite correctly, although this sort of misattribution or muddling of the water, Ringman's work is, absolutely spot on. The effort of teams of, you know, of teams of engines, not even people, is lower than an individual when you measure the output, because coordinating those things is difficult. that's fine. Like, we, we know that. We know that the larger group gets, the harder it gets just to coordinate the effort to, because the, the management overhead that is required to synchronize all the effort is really, really high. if you really break it down to an atomic level, that on its own is powerful, but too many people then claim that Ringelmann, had some element of motivation in his original work, which he didn't. Um, and that, that doesn't really matter, but let's just try to educate people about what Ringelmann actually said, and not conflate that with social loafing, because actually social loafing is almost the superior version of the theory that came along much later in the 20th century.

Andrew: 15:51

you don't have to be a genius to hear those results and then go, okay, but with the humans, I don't know, I don't know about horses motivation, but with the humans, we all can instinctively say, yeah, but you just, there's all those people that just don't try as hard.

Mark Ridley: 16:11

fortunately there's, there's now, you know, there's a whole body of research that extended Ringelmann. Um, and I think that's, that's probably the segue into the, the work of Ingham first and then maybe Latane later,

Andrew: 16:24

What needed to be established was I guess you say Ringo would find something really interesting out. And when you're then thinking about group work and teamwork in the context of organization, business, and, and other forms of, uh, kind of coordinated work. When you start to think about it in those contexts. You are almost without needing to qualify it. You're moving into social processes. And I think. Where we'll end up coming back around full circle is that Ringelmann isolated the physical, the instrumental physical coordination puzzle and then further research tried to pick up the social puzzle and then where we land at the end of all of this in terms of teamwork is to recognize that there's a very complex interaction going on between the sort of instrumental and then social processes of coordination. Ingham work, which we can talk about was one prior to that you had Steiner. that was probably the research that established, well, there's, yes, we can recreate the Ringelmann, uh, experiments and determine that it's loss of coordination, but that work also probably was the, the work that established there's inadequate social coordination as well with humans. All the work we're talking about now does not involve. agricultural animals.

Mark Ridley: 18:13

Yeah. There's no more

Andrew: 18:14

yeah,

Mark Ridley: 18:15

in this

Andrew: 18:15

we've, we've, we've graduated exclusively to human research here. So Steiner's work sort of determined that we're talking about social coordination. and then the question I suppose is, Fine. We know that when people are exerting force, there's some kind of loss of overall output compared to what each individual is capable of exerting, force wise, physical force wise. Um, and we know that social coordination with humans probably has a part to play in that. overall outcome or output, I suppose you're better saying, but how do you isolate the effects? So there's a suggestion that social coordination is playing a part, but how do you demonstrate that it's that and not the other thing? And that's, that's where it's useful to take a, a little pit stop around the work by Alan Ingham and, colleagues. So George Levenger and James Graves, and they did the, the good old psychology experiment thing of, well, we need to isolate something and we can't, we can't exactly do it, in a, natural way. Well, trick people! So, uh, I don't mean that in a malicious way, but, you know, that's effectively what they did. They're still in the realm of the thing that they're looking at, so like the unit of analysis, I suppose you might say, but the thing that they want, they're wanting to study that people are doing is still physical exertion. So they replicated the Ringelmann experiment, of pulling on a rope, so exerting force on a rope. First of all, they established the same, the kind of repeated Ringelmann's processes to establish the same baseline effects. They can say, well, you know, in the same way that Steiner established, there's this, um, inverse, uh, relationship between the output and the amount of people doing it. So the more people you add, the, the, the less, uh, force per individual being exerted. so Ingham and his colleagues established that, and then they did a clever thing. Then what they did was, so they measured how much force does one person exert when they pull on the rope, how much force is exerted when two people pull on the rope, four, six. Then they blindfolded the participants. And they, so let's say you were a participant. Say, okay, Mark, we're going to blindfold you this time. We want you to pull on the rope as hard as you can on your own. And you go, okay, right. I'm on my own pulling rope. And then they say, Okay, we're going to do it with two people now. And they had someone, a kind of imposter, stand behind you. And you're still blindfolded. Yeah, and make grunting noises, essentially. Okay, Mark, there's two of you pulling now, go. And someone's going, oh, oh, behind you. And then, and then they did it with four and then did it with six. And guess what? The results were that there was still a decrement, there was still a reduction in the overall force produced, even when you believed that someone was pulling with you. So what that determined was, well, actually there was only ever one person pulling, but when you believed there was more than just you pulling, your input reduced, which isolated the social effect. Because there was no, there was no difference in the physical effects.

Mark Ridley: 22:08

isn't science awesome? Because it, it really shows that, because there, the, the Ingham et al paper, that was called the Ringelmann Effect right? So the Ringelmann effect studies of group size and group performance, that's what that paper was called. And I think that has a part to play in it being conflated with the motivational. Elements it was such a great experiment because like you say it was isolating a thing where Where what Ringelmann had evidenced was the output is lower. They, they weren't, they weren't talking about, he wasn't talking about effort in that context. He was saying the output is lower because of coordination. And then this extension of it from Ingham et al. Was, uh, really powerful because then it says, in fact, it's not just the output that's lower, the input is lower as well. So the actual effort being provided by that person is lower, not because it's being lost through some sort of mechanical, um, mechanical loss in the system, but actually because the person is trying less for some reason.

Andrew: 23:09

So that gets picked up by another group of scholars who are then interested in this social effect. So they're kind of going, okay. we've recognized that now we have established that social coordination is definitely a thing and it's acting independently of any physical, uh, coordination loss. Because I suppose one of the questions that remained there was, you know, is there some kind of physical feedback that you're experiencing when you're doing something, uh, like pulling on a rope that results in coordination loss. is it the physical act of pulling as a group that, creates this loss? Now that may be the case, but independently of that, there is clearly also a whole set of social dynamics that are, um, imposing their own impact on, on the processes. So Bib Latané and colleagues who picked this up and went to, went to look into the, the sort of social dimensions more specifically, um, because, albeit it had been isolated, it was then about, well, What's causing it, what's actually happening in these social processes that, that lead to this effect of kind of loss of social coordination. And it's probably worth saying at this point, the nice thing about all of this stuff on social loafing, as it came to be called, and it was Bib Latané and, uh, his colleagues who coined that term, uh, social loafing in this paper that picked up from Ingham, um, in, so it was, so Ingham, uh, and colleagues published their work in, in 1974 and Latane and colleagues published their work in 1979. It's worth mentioning that these experiments have been replicated and, validated on a number of occasions, looking at different formats of this, of the same kind of things, and exploring different parts of the dynamics. So it's, it's a, it's a well established phenomenon, probably the best way to put it. Latane, Williams, and Harkins, in this 1979 paper, they picked it up a really neat thing that they did, in fact. I think it's worth highlighting the elegance of the actual experiment that they ran is that they needed to look at something that was kind of intrinsically social. So you've got the Ringelmann era work, Ringelmann himself, Steiner, which was all principally physical activity. The neat thing that Latani, Williams and Harkins did was they found some activities that were physical, but were intrinsically social at the same time. So the activities that their participants did were clapping and cheering. These are physical things that we as humans engage in, but they are social things as well. We, we, we, we only clap when we're around others.

Mark Ridley: 26:41

I don't know about you. I, I, I clap on my own.

Andrew: 26:45

If you, if you send a really good email, you give yourself a round of applause. Like, you know,

Mark Ridley: 26:49

it's really high

Andrew: 26:50

motivation stuff Exactly. So these are intrinsically social activities, but they are, are, they are manifesting in, in a, in a, in a physical activity as well. So that in itself is a really clever thing to do, to try and. pivot the focus of this kind of set of effects into a social realm. and essentially they did the same thing. They said, okay, uh, we're going to ask you to clap. Uh, um, we're going to ask you to cheer. And they got, they got people into it. You sat around in a group. And they would get the kind of allocated, sequence of things to do. And you'd be told, okay, Mark, it's your turn to clap, your turn to cheer. And then it'd be like, oh, Mark and Andrew, right? You're going to cheer this time. And they would count them down. And they established the same effects. So, uh, the, uh, the, and they were measuring with, um, you know, Noise pressure. So, uh, the amount of noise created by one individual was louder than the individual inputs of noise pressure created by two people when they were shouting together. Yes, the overall output was higher, but the proportionate input was lower. So basically the larger the group got, the less noise each individual was making, both when they were clapping and when they were shouting.

Mark Ridley: 28:19

And that's clearly not a coordination thing, right? Because you don't particularly need to coordinate clapping and cheering other than, um, starting and finishing roughly at the same time. the same time. So, so it's quite nice that it, it very clearly does exclude that element of coordination to, to a large extent that was so much part of what Ringelmann was looking at.

Andrew: 28:45

yeah, you don't, you don't look necessarily for, or it's quite difficult to get a sense of, feedback in, in these things. Uh, that's for sure. the nice thing about the clapping the cheering is, it's still, what would be termed a maximizing task. I probably should have said that they asked them to make as much noise as they could. So the, so I say maximizing, they were instructed that when they're asked to cheer and clap, they, the goal is to make as much noise as possible. So that means that you've got a goal of doing it as much as possible, it means that everybody doing the same thing, so they call it additive, so you and I both have to shout, we both have to do the same thing, and both of our inputs count under the same unit of measurement. Um, so, It's additive and it's unitary in that it's just one measurement of output so that there there are no sub goals or, you know, um, interdependent processes in place here. So yeah, the, experiment was done. They established that the same thing happened. Then what they did was they put. I mean, it's the 70s, so I don't know if we could say noise cancelling headphones, but headphones certainly that, um, that, um,

Mark Ridley: 30:14

Big

Andrew: 30:15

yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess you could, you could probably put things that just blocked loads of noise. In those headphones, they played the noise of other people, uh, shouting. So the, the point being that they were trying to manipulate how many people were shouting at a time, uh, according to the, um, the experience of the participants. And they went through the, the, the process again. Um, and the same, the same effect was established. So what they've done is in a way, it's the same as blindfolding, uh, that Ingham and, uh, colleagues did, uh, even when you aren't getting the direct sensation of shouting with one other person, three other people, the reason they were playing the music in the, in, in the ears was blinds your ears to how many other people are actually shouting or how many other people are actually clapping. that Resulted in the same thing. So the there was a loss of overall output. The more people were actually making noise.

Mark Ridley: 31:37

was there anything in that in, I guess, specifically in Latane's, um, research that indicated why it was happening? And I guess that's true of both Ingham and Latane. Did, did they, did they put forward any suggestions as to what might have caused it?

Andrew: 31:51

yes, it is. And there's been loads of further work on this. Um, which I only say that just to say. They find out some really interesting stuff. It's been developed and other theories have been introduced since then, but their original findings were really interesting and they still endure, uh, and they still make complete sense. So they essentially divided their suggestions for what it all means into three. So they talked about the effect of attribution and equity. They talked about submaximal goal setting. and he talked about lessened contingency between input and outcome.

Mark Ridley: 32:37

can you translate those things into less

Andrew: 32:39

Yeah.

Mark Ridley: 32:40

terms?

Andrew: 32:40

I think the effective attribution equity to me is a really interesting one. because it overlaps with a couple of other sort of psychological theories about our perceptions of the world around us. but essentially what it's about is how sensitively we can identify the precise efforts of others. and that's, that's almost a sort of physical thing, but then it relates to our sense of equity and fairness. So if we're being told to shout as loud as we can, we've got a big social sensor in our heads being like, yeah but how loudly is Mark shouting? We've both been asked to shout as loud as we can, but the two of us are being asked to shout I want it to be fair. So I don't think that I should be shouting louder than Mark. So we're almost in a bit of a Mexican standoff trying to work out, well, how, how loudly is the other one shouting? And then I need to, I'll, I'll pitch myself, um, accordingly. I'm doing a bit of an, uh, I'm about to do a bit of a pivot my own and like, you know, kind of extrapolating out into other psychological theory here. So, you know, health warning, but, um, what the paper, what they, what they discuss in the papers, they're basically saying the interesting thing is that We will always hear our input as louder than those of people around us.

Mark Ridley: 34:16

Yeah.

Andrew: 34:17

from a psychophysical perspective, we will always attribute the noise produced in this setting, where it's production of noise, but this, this power law applies to loads of things, pressure, you know, it's not just noise, but in this case, it was noise. I will always attribute a lower output judgment on what I hear coming out of your mouth, compared to what I hear coming out of my mouth. When you mix it with our sense of fairness, we're both going to be, um, continuously downgrading our sense of how, of how much we should be putting in. because we're judging the other person's input to be lower. And then we go, well, that's not fair. So I'll make mine lower. And we essentially, we're dragging each other down.

Mark Ridley: 35:09

I mean, obviously, the, this type of experiment has been replicated in loads of situations where, and including some of the research through the 2000s, where it's nothing to do with physical effort or, uh, or how much noise that you make. So that is definitely appropriate for the latane work, which is very much about noise making, but we see, we see this social loafing applied. regardless of the team or the group work situation, right?

Andrew: 35:38

Yeah. And that's where other psychological phenomena come in. Because there's a concept called overconfidence bias. it basically the, the, the, the headline news on overconfidence bias is we all think we're better than we are. Um, and that applies to all kinds of situations. Uh, you know, the, the, the studies that are done are things like, you know, the famous one is on average, um, how good a driver do you think you are? And it's like, 97 percent of people think that they're above average driver and so on. Of course that can't possibly be true in a, in a distribution. So, overconfidence bias is something that humans are prone to and there are three kind of categories of overconfidence bias, but probably the ones that are most applicable here are overestimation over placement. So within overconfidence bias, overestimation is essentially, what is the actual value of our, of our individual performance? So how, on average, how do we judge the level of our performance? And we tend to think it's better than it is. Um, and then overplacement is how do we judge our performance relative to others? And we tend to think, uh, our performance is superior to the performance of others around us. And that's just a general psychological phenomenon that exists across all categories for individuals on judging their inputs. The point being that that's very likely what you're seeing in teams more generally is the phenomenon of attribution equity that Latane and colleagues identified. within a social experiment that was to do with noise production, and it's probably perpetuated through things like, you know, overconfidence is probably the, the, the moderating feature that happens in, in kind of purely social cognitive, um, uh, situations. that, was the first thing and it really drills down into what I think is that deeply held sensitivity for fairness that we have in, in what we're doing. Um, and the thing I like about it is there's a lesson there in general for teamwork is that if you accept as someone who operates within a team. You see, actually, almost a sort of universal truth of operating in a team is that you are always going to judge what people around you are doing to be of lower value, lower output, lower quality, and that's incorrect. It's a mind trick you have to play on yourself because if everybody's doing it and they are incorrect in that judgment, everybody's dragging each other down.

Mark Ridley: 38:38

I want to look into that antagonism part a little bit, um, so that the antagonistic approach to reduction of, of effort. And one of the things that I wanted to mention was I, in looking, in looking up the research around Latane and Ingham, one of the things I found was the sucker effect. So Norbert Kerr proposed this thing called the sucker effect, and there is a very slight difference in what he proposed to social loafing. So in social loafing, the Latane version of this, um, it struck me that it was sort of non aggressive. It was the sense that there is a diffusion of responsibility, and the Latane work wasn't specifically saying people are maliciously reducing their effort. It was, it was more the sense that when I'm in a group, and responsibility for the outcome is diffused, I'm going to lower my effort To match those of people around me, like absence of my effort won't be so noticed or so

Andrew: 39:37

Yeah,

Mark Ridley: 39:38

you know,

Andrew: 39:38

a really important point, is, and this is coming, I mean, without getting too technical about the research processes, but, um, well, sod it, let's get technical. Latane, came up with this concept of, of, of social impact theory, and that's really what is in that first kind of finding. That's what that's what that we're referring to is there's a, there's a signal that's been sent to a group of people. The social impact diffuses. the, the, the responsibility for it. Um, and it's not, it's not malicious. It's not, it's not kind of, you know, self serving or something. It's just a natural phenomenon of diffusion. And it works in the opposite way as well. Like if you're down in the pub with a group of friends and there's six of you and five of them are getting torn into the drinks and you're like, Hey, uh, I'll sit this round out, you know, the social impact you feel as an individual trying to kind of make another choice. The social impact is going to be stronger the more group, the more friends there are. If you're with two friends or one friend, it's socially easier to say, I'm not going to do what the group's doing. So the social impact diffuses or concentrates in both directions,

Mark Ridley: 40:54

And I think as well in the Latane there was almost a sense that some of this was not necessarily the high ego thing that you described, but actually I'm not important. And so they won't notice my, me. My effort was actually one of the other things that kind of came out of that research. So I think the thing that stood out for me when I, when I look at Latane, Latane, and then this later Kerr piece of work was Latane was quite passive and it was, it was a non aggressive and non malicious. Kerr did a piece of research that apparently was similar. So I haven't read this, this paper, but I've seen summaries of it, which had groups where they were. there was a team exercise, um, and the groups were encouraged to perform, but they could manipulate how they would perceive the efforts of others around them. And so there are two really important parts to this that, that, There's the concept of free riding, which is kind of related to social loafing, but so free riding, and we've talked about this actually in the Tomasello work and back in the evolutionary psychology work, that in cultures, in communities, even through primate anthropology, you can see that there is this free riding way. where the group will do something and there will be a free rider that takes part of it. And that's something that actually communication and intelligence has developed to combat, because the group is together for a bigger purpose and then this free riding will happen, but we need to get rid of it. what Kerr was looking at was he was saying inside these groups free riding will happen, but what is the impact of individual contribution if free riding is seen within the group? So social loafing was sort of this group thing where my My individual contribution won't count that much. Nobody will notice if I reduce it. Kerr introduced the concept of the sucker effect, which is malicious, and I'm sure that we all have, um, can identify with this and have seen it. It's where you, identify that somebody in your group isn't pulling their weight, is free riding, and so your response to that is Well, if they're not trying, I'm not going to try either. So you actively reduce your effort. Not because you, you feel like it won't be noticed, but almost the opposite. I'm going to reduce my effort because that person isn't trying, the free rider isn't trying. So, why should I try harder? When they're going to benefit from, from me trying. So the sucker effect, which was I think in 19, it was a 1983 paper subtly moved on from the, the, the quite nice and social Latané work, which is the Okay, it is, it is, um, partly to do with coordination. Is it, there is a strong element of motivate, individual motivation, but it's not malicious. And then Kerr came along and said. No, there is another, another layer to this as well, which is absolute malicious reduction of effort because you see free riders for whatever reason. And this is a spiral. And this is where it gets really important for the teams that we see today. Because I think we've both seen this in the guests that we've spoken to. When we say, what are your red flags for teams? Often, it is identifying that somebody in that group isn't trying. It's, it's, it's a lack of motivation. And when you get that sort of bad apple Um, problem that one person isn't trying. You see the team spiral. And that's exactly what the sucker effect is. You see a downward spiral for the whole team where entire team output continues to spiral downwards. It's not some fixed reduction individual has 0. 8 of their output when they're in a group and that that lowers as the group gets bigger. And that's probably an important point that we should also talk about, about group size, the importance of group size. Because it wasn't the same amount of reduction. It certainly wasn't in, true in Ringelmann's work back at the beginning, but I don't think it was true in Latane's work or Ingham's work. The reduction increased the larger the group was.

Andrew: 44:38

yeah, basically the, the, the, the bigger the group, the more exposed it is to social loafing. Yes, the kind of sucker effect is like a race to the bottom. It's because, because you don't want to be the sucker. You're working hard. That person's getting away with not doing anything. Why should you work? it's got echoes of one of Latane and colleagues findings. And that's the, that was the third one of lessened contingency between input and outcome. So I'll jump onto that, Broad strokes are talking about, perception of, of, of reward for individual contribution. again, it's a kind of about sensitivity. So being able to get a sense of what the apparent reward is for your input and what your input is relative to other people. when it's difficult to get a sense of that's being measured, I suppose you could say you become demotivated to, to increase your input or to work as hard as you can. Um, and they, this is, this is where it relates to the sucker effect is that one way that that happens with the contingencies between input and outcome is hiding in the crowd. you recognize that it's quite difficult for it to be, to be worked out. just how much you are putting the effort in. Essentially, nobody's going to catch you if you slack off. so you can hide in the crowd. A bit like what the, the sucker effect is about the reaction of the people around the person that's hiding in the crowd. Um, but there, this demonstrates why someone hides in the crowd is because they see, well, there doesn't seem to be much. Uh, in the way of, uh, uh, measuring and accounting for how different individuals are contributing to the overall output. The other one is being lost in the crowd in that I don't see how a disproportionately positive effort or input, it's going to result in anything good for me.

Mark Ridley: 46:47

difference?

Andrew: 46:48

like, there'll be no extra reward if I make an extra special effort. Um, and so this is about that relationship between what the overall reward is and how you perceive the outcome. your input relative to others.

Mark Ridley: 47:03

It almost feels like you almost have to start from a point where of relative altruism in, in the group, and then there are these negative effects on it, um, and maybe in some further episode, we'll look at some of the positive effects because this isn't just a downward spiral. This is one of the very complex things that's swirling in teamwork. There is this, this negative downward pull on, on productivity, but. It seems that it's tapping into lots of the controls that have been established our propensity, our evolutionary prop, propensity to collaboration that we're actually looking for those signals we're looking for to, to eliminate free riders. Um, and, and I think it's that, that sense that. some of those things that were in the latane work, the social loafing work, hiding in the crowd and being lost in the crowd. The, the person who is overall responsible, let's say there is some external management responsibility that says, I am, I'm responsible for the output of this team, can't really necessarily identify that free riding, but the group do. And that's, that's a really interesting signal that comes back. So the sucker effect is about the group identifying the poor performers. And so there is that whole thing about how do you take the team level view? How do you get right inside the team so that you can hear what they're hearing, see what they're seeing? Because they are probably identifying where the free riding is happening.

Andrew: 48:33

the uh, part of, of teamwork. it's about also understanding where, where the goal, the motivation is coming from, because. All of these experiments, one of the uniting things about all these experiments is these are groups of subjects who are participating in an experiment who are being given an external task. what that doesn't account for when it comes to teamwork is that a really effective way of ensuring that a team has the ingredients that it requires to thrive is that it has ownership. Of, or at least significant stake in the development of the goals and the objectives that it holds. we talk about myth busting. We're not necessarily myth busting in terms of the research here. We're giving a, we're giving a context and history to, to where this really important phenomenon came from and was established in the literature. But the thing that is, they have in common is that all of these participants were being given an external goal. And. You talk about the, these tensions that exist within, within all team dynamics and, you know, We describe it as snakes and ladders, because you're coming back to that old adage of, uh, of a team is greater than the sum of its parts. And it's probably pertinent to mention that in this conversation, because we're talking about kind of adding up inputs. Um, you know, this research says, well, teamwork is not greater than the sum of its parts, because the sum of the individual parts are actually lower. than they would be if they were individually measured. However, it's about multiplying and dividing. So the coordination loss is A divider. It's a snake that you slide down in teamwork. It's a trap that you can fall into. But the multiplicative effect that you can get through effective teamwork is a ladder that allows you to, you know, that's the greater than the sum of the parts piece. this actually almost allows me to segue into the third finding from Latanya as well is, is to say that The thing that is mentioned in lots of these articles, lots of this research, talks about how there are differences when you have interdependent processes going on. It's very easy to establish social loafing, it's very easy to isolate it, identify it and diagnose the conditions that cause it, which are all really important and useful. But as I mentioned earlier, these were all maximizing tasks, so they're additive, they're unitary. So everybody's doing the same thing. Everybody's trying to reach one measurement of a goal. if you're doing something that requires, Sub groups of people to do sub groups of tasks and coordinate them together. The, um, that's where you have the opportunity to create the multiplicative effect of that coordination. but it's not something you see evidence of when you're just doing a maximizing thing. But what's interesting is that what Latane and colleagues found was. When you put people into a group and give them a maximizing task, one of the explanations for why you got lost when you increased the amount of people that were doing the task was that they started to reinterpret the goal. So you say to people, right, you're going to shout. You're going to cheer together, um, make as much noise as possible. And when it's on, when you're on your own, it feels like a very obvious, uh, unequivocal request, right? I've got to make as much noise as possible, right? I'll shout. When it's multiple people and probably interacting with these other signals you're getting like, oh, you know, Mark doesn't seem to be shouting as loud as I am. Because of these psychosocial things and, uh, thinking of equity. what they're suggesting is that people start to reinterpret the goal. So they start, once they're in a crowd, it's like, oh, we're told to shout as loudly as we can, but, you know, there's loads of us, maybe they're actually wanting us to shout assert, past a certain threshold.

Mark Ridley: 53:05

we clap in time or do

Andrew: 53:07

exactly. So we, we, we get given the, the, the, the slightest hint of doubt around precisely what the goal is, and we start to imagine alternative goals. So they talk about, um, submaximal goal setting, where instead of thinking about, we just need to shout as loud as we all can individually. Well, maybe they're actually looking for this kind of optimal level that we need to achieve as a group. And I guess we probably reach it together. So you just suddenly pull off the gas as an individual. You're like, well, we're probably, we're probably, there's six of us now shouting, we'll probably make it. It's something. I see in some of my other research, it's not to do with this sort of thing exactly, it's to do with decision making, but when a team is unsure of what their goal is, they spend a bit of time making it up. They started out going towards a decision on the basis of a goal that they all understood. They encounter some kind of uncertainty and they start to manipulate the goal to make the situation less uncertain. And It is a different thing, but it's a parallel, I mean, a different example of that sort of thing happening, which is very easy to get drawn into a subtle reinterpretation of the goal to sort of make your current experience a little bit more comfortable.

Mark Ridley: 54:33

that sense of a team. Feeling like they're just doing enough is certain that that is very much my interpretation of the Latane work. I think we need to reconcile ourselves with the fact that that adage about teams being greater than the sum of their parts fundamentally untrue in one sense, that the effort of an individual is always going to be less, and I can reflect on this if you're writing code, it's five times quicker to do it. then to try to spread that load across the team. Primarily because of the communication. It's mechanistic problems,communication. And, um, and even splitting tasks takes a significant amount of time. So individually, the Every team member will deliver less, less than they might on their own. But that's not the point. You're not looking at teams as if they were some additive of this person's effort and this person's effort. The point of a team is it can achieve something that an individual can't. And that fundamentally for me is one of the differences between teams and groups. A group could be 10 individuals all doing their own thing and you're measuring the output. But a team is something where that loss is actually entirely reasonable. The loss of the individual output is entirely reasonable because of that really significant maximizing multiplicative effort, as you say, or the outcome that you say. can't do what teams do, and that's why we have teams, and that's why we're born to actually do teamwork.

Andrew: 56:07

Exactly. And nowadays, more than ever, the things that we're trying to achieve require the sort of teamwork that, Needs to come. It has complexity and it has, um, the sort of scale of the things that we're trying to achieve require teamwork implicitly. So what I was talking about before were maximizing optimizing. If you've got an overall objective that requires subdivision of interdependent tasks, and you need multiple people to multiple people to collaborate on those sub processes. Hey, you're talking about teamwork. I think social loafing even as a term, it's characterizing the negative, right? It's like, oh, if you put a team together, you'll always get a couple of chancers try to work less hard. What a lot of this research tells us is that there are actually some sort of guess you could even call the kind of bugs in our, our system as individual contributors that make us predisposed to misinterpret. what is going on around us. That's, that's number one. and also not necessarily, like you say, also not necessarily to frame in a black and white manner, the fact that just because when you scale up to multiple people working together, just because they're individual, input may overall reduce does not mean it's a bad thing. I mean, from a point of view of organizations, that's a good ingredient for team resilience. the other thing is that it does highlight the attention you need to pay to the role of motivation and goals and objectives. So, a really effective team is bound around genuine investment in what the team is there to do and to achieve. And that probably needs. Continuous attention. That's something that needs a continuous attention to try and keep that, um, relative, relative aggregate input at a level, and ensure that there aren't individuals that are dropping way below that. but it's the intrinsic investment in the goal is a moderator on, on input. because I'm not only thinking about how much other people are doing on the basis of some external pressure that's been put on me. I'm thinking about what I'm doing in order to lead us all towards a goal that we all care about. you are going to have problems with social loafing if a group of people have been given an, a goal or an objective. that they had no, no stake in whatsoever. It doesn't mean that they have to have arrived at the decision themselves, but if they weren't involved in the, in the conception of the goal, then maybe, maybe the circumstances meant they couldn't be, then you need to price in some social loafing.

Mark Ridley: 59:29

And I think your point there, that's a great point to end on, that the, the attention that we need to pay here is to make sure that they are agreed on by the, the team who have a significant, um, desire to be included in, in the outcome or to, to partake in the outcome. Because that, those things are what really make a team function. you know, I also sometimes people talking about how, um, they don't want to be part of a team because they go fast on their own. And to that, I think we've got this really important pushback, which says, yeah, you're going to go slower, but you will achieve things that you couldn't on your own.

Andrew: 1:00:08

it's double think, because you know, the answer to someone who says, I don't like working in teams, cause I can go faster on my own. And you're like, yes, Like, empirically, factually, you are correct, but you will go relatively faster. I'm reminded of what Gemma was saying in, that conversation where she's, she was going the, albeit it's a bit of a reverse, but the point was the team always performed better than, than the individual. And the kind of input factors are different only if you're talking relatively, because If you, if you take it literally, in Ringelmann's original study, someone exerted X force, two people achieved significantly more force together. Yes, relatively, their individual inputs, when divided, were lower. But the overall score is higher and, you know, in a way, you have to, squint your eyes slightly, but essentially that, that's what Gemma was finding in, in her contemporary team based learning for, you know, highly skilled professionals environment, which was the team always did better than the individual. So the response to the whole, I do, I do, I go faster on my own, relatively speaking, you might.

Mark Ridley: 1:01:33

Yeah, and I think that's actually a lovely place to end up, that despite Ringelmann evidencing that coordination is hard, and Latane showing that social loafing happens because people disappear into the crowd, and Kerr's sucker effect, and malicious freeriders, and then people reducing the downwards viral, despite all of those things, Gemma could prove that teams in team based learning had better outcomes than, than individual learning behaviors. And that's just one example of it. So finishing on a high, on a quite negative set of findings, you know, we accept those things, we guard against them, but still teams are magical.

Andrew: 1:02:08

and social loafing is not evidence of a failing team. It's, it's evidence of a naturally occurring, uh, quirk of human dynamics, but it's something to be accepted and worked with and, uh, mitigated, but it's not, it's not evidence that you shouldn't do, you shouldn't engage in teamwork.

Mark Ridley: 1:02:29

absolutely right. Well, I think that's it for this episode then. So we've, we've now heard all of the, the truth behind Ringelmann and Latane and Ingham and Kerr, hopefully. And there's just way more of this on, on the horizon as well. We've got to, we haven't even got into the, the 2000s and the more

Andrew: 1:02:46

Yeah, we haven't, we haven't, we haven't even got past the, the 80s really. Oh dear. Yeah.

Mark Ridley: 1:02:53

What a decade.