Brian Johnson explains social loafing, the tendency to slack off when working in groups where individual effort goes unnoticed. The classic study had people pull a rope with less force in groups than alone. His antidote: be the one person visibly giving full effort.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic one. In the last couple 1s we talked about baseline resetting as we made sure we upgraded the resolution of our lives. Note, I would have described the latest TV models more accurately, but I haven't owned a TV in over 15 years. Which for the record, is one of the ways I keep my energy resolution so high. Now today we're going to talk about that dream I had. Let's get to work. So I vaguely remember playing some super weird Quidditch like game. The kids and wife and I just watched the first two Harry Potters and I might have scored some pretty sweet goals. We won. Let's go. Then I seem to remember walking back to whatever headquarters like camp we were staying at. And apparently we needed to make sure we weren't seen by some bad guys or something. So one of the guys in our group was picking up some trash we had left behind that might have given up our location. Now that I think about it, I think he was kind of like Hagrid. I love that guy. So I followed this awesome guy's lead and I started making sure I picked up the trash stuff as well. But no one else was. So then I, at least the dream version of me, decided to give a little talk on the subject. I was laughing as I typed this, mostly at myself, that I have dreams like this and I do plus ones in those dreams. Here's what I talked about. Scientists can bring people into a lab and ask them to pull a rope as hard as they can as they measure how hard they pulled it. Then they put them in a group and ask them to all pull again. And guess what happens? On average, they don't pull as hard when they're with other people as they did when they were by themselves. Eek. You know what scientists call that? They call it social loafing. Unfortunately, people tend to be a bit lazy when their individual effort is masked within a collective effort. Eek. Now that's the bad news. But here's the good news. There's an antidote to social loafing. You know what it is? If the group of people can see one person who is clearly going all out, then the other people will work harder. I got tears in my eyes typing that. Today's plus one. Go be that one person. Give us all you've got today.
