Group activities are usually activities in public, in the presence of other group members. Our behavior is influenced not only by the presence of the members of the group we belong to, but also by any other people. Research on group activities began with the study of the influence of other people on an individual’s behavior.

Bib Latane was one of the first to try to explain this in his theory of social impact (Latane V., 1981). He argues that the power of other people’s influence is explained by several factors.:

1. the number of people;
2. their spatial proximity;
3. their authority and status.

To illustrate the cumulative effects of these factors, Latane uses an analogy with electric light bulbs. Just as the amount of light falling on a surface depends on the number of lamps, their proximity to the surface, and their power, social impact depends on the number of people, their proximity, and the degree of influence. As the number of people increases, so does the degree of their influence. However, this effect has a limit. Increasing the number of people from 1 to 5 will be more effective than, say, from 20 to 25. If we talk about three- or four-digit numbers, then the effect of an increase in the number of people is likely to fade altogether. The territorial proximity of other people is a less powerful, but nevertheless also an effective factor. It’s one thing when people are far away from you, it’s another when they’re very close. Finally, the third factor is the degree of influence of other people. It is determined by status, power, authority, etc. Will you feel the same way when giving a presentation to a student group and a meeting of scientists? All of these factors, individually and collectively, have an impact on us. Moreover, in different situations, this influence will vary. After all, the people whose presence affects us can act in different roles. They can be just spectators, they can act as rivals, competitors, and they can finally be members of our group, with whom we work together. Each of these situations will affect our feelings and behavior in its own way. Therefore, it makes sense to get acquainted in general terms with the effect of influence in each of the listed situations.

People react differently to attention from others. It worries some, makes them feel embarrassed, blush, stutter, get confused in words and actions, even experience a state of suffocation due to the fact that their throat is choked with excitement. Others, on the contrary, rejoice, feel a surge of energy and begin to feel more confident and calmer if they notice that they arouse interest. If a person really feels a surge of inspiration and vivacity in the presence of an audience and listeners, then his activity improves, becomes polished, inspired, and sometimes simply brilliant. A completely different effect occurs when confusion and self-doubt are hidden behind the assumed calm. The consequence of this is a deterioration in activity, sometimes very significant, no matter how cheerful the person is. One of the indicators of self-doubt is speaking “on paper.” Floyd Allport, analyzing these phenomena in 1920, called them “audience effects.” He also proposed terms to denote these two opposite effects: improving performance in the presence of other people was called social facilitation (social facilitation). The opposite phenomenon, that is, the deterioration of activity, was called social inhibition (social deterrence) by Allport. In 1965, Robert Zaionets proposed the first theoretical explanation of the audience effect.

Zaionts suggested that the presence of other people is a strong stimulus for an individual, a source of general arousal. Indeed, their intentions are not clear, and it is unclear how they will behave in the next minute. All this causes a feeling of uncertainty and, as a result, excitement. In the case when a person knows how and what he needs to do and feels confident about it, the excitement caused by the presence of the audience contributes to his activity, improves it. Moreover, an increase in the incentive, that is, an increase in the number of people present, intensifies the facilitation effect. But when a reaction is poorly learned, the individual’s activity worsens, since the realization of a necessary but poorly learned reaction is hindered by a dominant, albeit unnecessary reaction. In other words, social inhibition sets in. Thus, Robert Zaionts had every reason to conclude that increased arousal improves the performance of simple tasks and worsens the performance of complex ones. This hypothesis has been confirmed in almost 300 studies involving more than 25,000 subjects. On the other hand, Nicholas Cottrell came up with an alternative explanation of the audience effect (Cottrell N., 1972). In his opinion, this phenomenon is explained by the fact that people engaged in some kind of activity in the presence of other people (in public) expect to be evaluated by the audience and are concerned about how they will be evaluated. Cottrell and his supporters have provided considerable evidence that there are differences between how an individual perceives the mere presence of other people and when he expects to be evaluated by others.

Robert Baron (Baron R., 1986) tried to resolve the dispute between N. Cottrell and R. Zaionts in his theory of attention conflict. He claims that individuals of their own species act as an annoying and distracting factor for many reasons, including the one he calls Zayonts. Indeed, Baron believes, the presence of others is a source of excitement. But before arousal can arise, the presence of others, being a distracting factor, will cause a conflict of attention in a busy individual. And already this conflict of attention will lead to intense arousal. Arousal, in turn, will be the body’s response to the increased need for energy in order to cope with the resulting conflict of attention. And depending on how the individual manages to cope with it, arousal will either facilitate or hinder the performance of his activities. If an individual pays too much attention to the audience present, then as a result of social inhibition, his activity may stop altogether. If, instead, he focuses his main attention on his activities, then increased arousal will either contribute to a well-mastered (dominant) reaction, or restrain the implementation of a poorly mastered (non-dominant) reaction. Baron’s theory is more complex, but it makes it possible to understand the effect of the viewer effect in both humans and animals, who may also experience a conflict of attention. The only difference is that people’s expectation of appreciation from the audience leads to an additional increase in the conflict of attention. After all, most people want to look their best in the eyes of others. And if a person is doing a relatively simple task, which he has mastered well, and performs it expertly, then the excitement in the presence of an audience caused by a conflict of attention can help improve his performance. Not only other people can cause a conflict of attention, but the individual performer himself can act as a spectator — evaluator of his own activity and thus increase the conflict, and therefore arousal. This addition to the development of the theory of R. Boron was proposed by Cat Szymanski and Stephen Harkins (Szymanski K., Harkins S., 1987).

It is traditionally believed, especially in our society, that collective, group activities are much more effective than individual efforts. In many cases, especially when it comes to physical labor, this is indeed the case. However, not everything is clear here. The activity of a group is not always more productive than the activity of an individual or scattered working people. When people work in a group, and even more so in a large group, it is more likely that individual efforts will decrease and people will not work at full strength. In social psychology, this phenomenon is called social laziness (loafing). This phenomenon became known thanks to the research of the French agricultural scientist Max Ringelman (1913). Studying labor productivity in agriculture, Ringelman compared the relative efficiency of animal, human, and machine traction when moving goods. At the same time, it turned out that, acting alone, people pulled the load with an average force of 63 kg. The French scientist was surprised that two people did not pull with a force of 126 kg, three — 189 kg, etc. A group of two people had an average thrust of only 118 kg (loss — 8 kg), a group of three people pulled with an average force of 160 kg (loss — 29 kg), and a group of Eight people put in 256 kg of effort below their potential. Thus, as the group grew, productivity decreased. Nothing like this happened when horses, cattle, and, of course, cars were working. This inverse relationship between the number of people in a group and a decrease in their individual efforts is called the “Ringelman effect.” The scientist explained this phenomenon by the fact that when several individuals work together, there is no proper coordination of their actions. In other words, when there are many of them, people begin to act like the swan, crab and pike from the famous fable of I. A. Krylov, as a result of which the effectiveness of their joint work decreases. Modern researchers who have studied facilitation and inhibition have come to the conclusion that the “Ringelman effect” is explained not so much by a lack of coordination as by a lack of desire to work at full strength in a group setting. That is why the modern concept of “social laziness” has appeared. Kipling Williams, Stephen Harkins, and Bib Latane (1981) point to the fact that individuals “dissolve” into a large group as one of the reasons for laziness. If a person is sure that his activity is not recorded and not evaluated, then you can work “carelessly”. Being anonymous, a person can simply cheat and shirk work. Even if only one person from the group avoids participating in joint activities, then the rest of the group members will have a reasonable doubt — why are we working conscientiously? It is enough not even to know, but to suspect that others are working in bad faith, so that the effect of social laziness in the group has acquired impressive proportions. *** Based on the above, it may seem that it is good to relax and have fun as a group, rather than work, and that it is better to work alone. However, this is not entirely true. Modern industrial activity is unthinkable without cooperation, collaboration and collective forms of work. Many types of production require organized, group efforts. Group activities may contain flaws, but they can’t be avoided either. The main thing is that the costs do not exceed the benefits and thus do not negate the advantages of collective labor. In addition, social psychologists have identified a number of conditions under which the costs of group activity caused by laziness and lack of coordination can be minimized or completely absent. Here they are:

1. Extraordinarily difficult problems that can unite a group and encourage each of its members to work with full dedication.
2. The interest of all group members in the final result of joint efforts.
3. The presence of good business relations in the group.
4. Accounting and evaluation of the contribution of each member of the group to joint work, that is, the absence of depersonalization.
5. There is a special agreement in the group to work at full capacity.
6. The presence of a group-wide standard of activity and productivity, which all members of the group strive to meet.
7. The presence of not only a difficult task, but also an interesting one for everyone (for example, a complex intellectual problem).

Author: Nikolay Ivanovich Semechkin, PhD, Head of the Department of Psychology at the Far Eastern State University. Photo: www.emscrm.com