SOMEONE ELSE IS PROBABLY TAKING CARE OF THAT

Max Ringelmann may have performed the very first social psychology experiment. He just didn’t know it at the time.

Ringelmann was a student of agricultural engineering in France in the 1880s.

He was interested in efficiencies.

He wanted to know how to plow a field in the best way. Was it to use laborers? Animals? …One must feed animals, so is there a point where the cost of food outweighs the benefit of using multiple animals to plow a field?

He started his experiments with a set of human workers: 14 healthy young male volunteers.

The French. Notorious for banding together.

He first asked each worker to grab a 5-meter rope and pull a load for five seconds, on their own. He used a dynamometer to measure the force that they each exerted.

Then, he had several of the men pull the load, together. Again, measuring with the dynamometer.

He tried different combinations, up to 7 men all pulling the rope at a time.

Over the next three decades, Ringelmann recreated this experiment over 26 times, using different weights of load, different lengths of rope, different types of workers, and different orders in which the workers pulled.

Each result was the same.

When one person was pulling on their own, they exerted a certain amount of force.

But as more people joined the work, while the overall force increased, the amount of force exerted by each individual worker actually decreased.

Ringelmann hypothesized two reasons for this. The first was poor coordination. He thought that when more people were added, their effort didn’t always align. So a portion of one worker’s effort was actually working against the other’s effort, creating a loss of efficiency.

The other reason was something that came to be called “social loafing” many years later. As each new worker was added, the others could “loaf” a bit more.

Subconsciously, their brains were saying “I can go a bit easier, because someone will pick up the slack.”

How many times do we see that in the creative process? When a creative team feels ownership over the work, they are responsible to each other to create great ideas.

But when group brainstorms start cropping up, and everyone is involved, it gets harder to create great ideas.

Often, these days, we hear the word “collaboration” as a defense of this methodology. But over a century ago, we saw the effect of adding too many people to a process. We start working against each other, and get lazier.

That’s why creating work these days seems to drag on. There’s plenty of reaction, but not a lot of creation. After all, “someone else is probably taking care of that”.

This is the first image that came up when I searched “group brainstorm” which is perfect because it’s exactly what that shit looks like.