A phenomenon known as social facilitation refers to the enhancement of an individual’s performance when that person works in the presence of other people. Social facilitation, though, depends on the task: other people facilitate performance when the task is so simple that it requires only dominant responses (i.e., well-learned or instinctive), but others interfere when the task requires nondominant responses (i.e., novel, complicated behaviors).
Groups tend to be underachievers. Studies of social facilitation confirmed the positive motivational benefits of working with other people on well-practiced tasks in which each member’s contribution to the collective enterprise can be identified and evaluated. But what happens when tasks require a truly collective effort?
First, when people work together they must coordinate their individual activities and contributions to reach the maximum level of efficiency—but they rarely do (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987). Three people in a tug-of-war competition, for example, invariably pull and pause at slightly different times, so their efforts are uncoordinated. The result is coordination loss: the three-person group is stronger than a single person, but not three times as strong.
Second, people just don’t exert as much effort when working on a collective endeavor, nor do they expend as much cognitive effort trying to solve problems, as they do when working alone. They display social loafing (Latané, 1981).
A self-serving pattern of attribution can also spill over into our attributions about the groups that we belong to. The group-serving bias, sometimes referred to as the ultimate attribution error, describes a tendency to make internal attributions about our ingroups’ successes, and external attributions about their setbacks, and to make the opposite pattern of attributions about our outgroups (Taylor & Doria, 1981). When members of our favorite sports team make illegal challenges on the field, or rink, or court, we often attribute it to their being provoked. What about when it is someone from the opposition? Their illegal conduct regularly leads us to make an internal attribution about their moral character!
The group attribution error describes a tendency to make attributional generalizations about entire outgroups based on a very small number of observations of individual members. Even when people are told that a member of the group was not typical of the group, they still made generalizations about group members that were based on the characteristics of the individual they had read about. This bias may thus cause us to see a person from a particular outgroup behave in an undesirable way and then come to attribute these tendencies to most or all members of their group.