Research On Social Loafing Effect In Creative Activities

It's a long history of the research about creativity, and there exist three main research approaches: personality psychology, cognitive psychology and social psychology. This study focuses on the social impact mechanism in the field of social psychology of creativity, and tries to explore the social loafing effect and its influencing factors in the creative activities.This study consisted of two sub-studies, and the dependent variable was the level of individual effort which were composed by two components: intensity and quality. Effort intensity was measured by the fluency of the individual divergent thinking output and effort quality was measured by the originality, flexibility and persistency of the individual divergent thinking output.The first study was to test whether there existed a social loafing effect in the creative activities. 36 Volunteers were divided into several groups, and then randomly assigned to experimental treatment at different levels(cooperation group, nominal group, individual group) for testing the difference in individual effort leval.The second study focused on the influencing factors of social loafing in the creative activities. Experiment 1, 48 volunteers were separated into 8 groups which were randomly assigned to the experimental treatment for testing the impact on the level of individual effort from goal difficulty variable (high, medium, low, the control group). Experiment 2, 48 volunteers were separated into 8 groups, which were randomly assigned to the experimental treatment for testing the impact on the level of individual effort from goal difficulty variable (high, medium, low, the control group) and mid-term evaluation (mid-term evaluation, no mid-term evaluation) . Experiment 3, 144 volunteers were separated into 24 groups ,which were randomly assigned to the experimental treatment for testing the impact on the level of individual efforts from goal difficulty variable (high, medium, low, the control group) and mid-term evaluation (mid-term evaluation, no mid-term evaluation) and performance assessment (assess the contribution of individual to group, do not assess the contribution of individual to group, the control group) .The conclusions were as follows:1. The level of individual efforts had a sifnificant difference in different types of group. Cooperation group stated the lowest level of individual efforts, followed by an individual group, and the highest was the nominal group.2. Social loafing effect appeared in the creative activities.3. Goal difficulty variable significantly affected the level of individual efforts. With the goal difficulty increaseing, the level of individual efforts was also on the rise.4. Mid-term assessment variable did not significantly affect the level of effort, and with no interaction effect with goal difficulty variable.5. Performance evaluation variable significantly affected the level of individual efforts. Assessing the contribution of individual to the group could motivate a higher level of individual effort. The variables of goal difficulty and performance evaluation had a cooperative effect on the individual level of effort.