Social Loafing and Swimming: Effects of Identifiability on Individual and Relay Performance of Intercollegiate Swimmers

Abstract

A sizable body of research indicates that people tend to put forth less effort when performing in groups than when alone, a phenomenon called social loafing. However, archival data suggest that swimmers actually perform better when swimming in relays than when swimming in individuals events. Physical factors contributing to this difference were controlled in an experiment in which the degree of identifiability of swimmers' times and type of event (individual vs. relay) were manipulated. A significant interaction between these two variables resulted, supporting previous social loafing findings. Swimmers recorded significantly better times in relays than individually when identifiability was high but tended to perform more poorly in relays under conditions of low identifiability.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 93 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.