What do you think of this fact?
Teamwork makes the dream work, right? A French agricultural engineer had numbers that say: it’s complicated.
Eight people, half the effort
Maximilien Ringelmann studied how efficiently horses, oxen, men and machines work on farms. His experiments with people ran mainly between 1882 and 1887 at the Grand-Jouan agricultural school, and he published them in 1913. In his summary table, one worker alone counts as 100 percent. In a pair, each person reached only 93 percent. In a group of three, 85 percent. In a group of eight, just 49 percent per person.
The totals look even stranger. Seven workers together managed 3.92 times the output of one person. Eight workers: also 3.92. On paper, the eighth person added nothing.
The rope that might not have been a rope
The study is usually retold as a rope-pulling experiment, and the Sage Encyclopedia of Group Processes describes groups of coworkers pulling on a rope. But when David Kravitz and Barbara Martin dug up the original article in 1986, they found that he did have people pull on a rope in some tests. But he never said which tasks were behind that famous table. Calling it rope-pulling data came later. The figures became widely known through a 1927 article by a writer named Moede, who credited Ringelmann only in parentheses in a figure caption.
So why do groups lose power? Partly because people don’t coordinate perfectly. But in 1974, Alan Ingham and his colleagues rebuilt the rope test with blindfolds. On some trials, participants believed they were pulling with others while they were actually pulling alone. Their performance still dropped. So it’s not just clumsy teamwork: people also seem to put in less effort as part of a group.
Bonus fact: In Ingham’s first study, pairs lost 9 percent and groups of three lost 18 percent. A fourth, fifth or sixth person made almost no further difference.
In 1979, Bibb Latané and his colleagues gave the phenomenon the name it still has today: social loafing. Many hands make light work, sometimes a little too light.