They called it social loafing. Since then, the experiment was rediscovered and psychologists set out to replicate it. In 1979, a group of scientists at Ohio State University asked their test subjects to shout as loud as they could and recorded the decibel levels they produced. Next the subjects were put in groups and asked to repeat the shouting. The results mirrored Ringelmann’s: Each person’s group shouts were up to 20 percent less loud than their individual ones. Time and again, researchers tried some variation of Ringelmann’s rope test and got the same results. It was a fact of human
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