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Individuals behave differently in the presence of others. Some scholars argue the mere presence of others has the capacity to improve task performance, while other researchers demonstrate individuals become “social loafers,” exerting less effort in group tasks unless they perceive potential for evaluation. I investigate these claims in the context of evaluating poll‐worker performance using two randomized field experiments conducted in New York City during a special election that took place in February 2009 and during the presidential primary conducted in April 2016. The results suggest that manipulating the presence of observers, or even poll workers’ perceptions of the potential for evaluation, likely enhances their performance overall, resulting, especially, in greater efficiency and potentially strengthening voters’ confidence that their ballots were accurately counted and diminishing perceptions of electoral fraud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social loafing and social facilitation are stable behavioral effects that describe increased or decreased motivation, as well as effort and cooperation in teamwork as opposed to individual working situations. Recent twin studies demonstrate the heritability of cooperative behavior. Brain imaging studies have shown that reciprocity, cooperativeness, and social rewards activate reward processing areas with strong dopaminergic input, such as the ventral striatum. Thus, candidate genes for social behavior are hypothesized to affect dopaminergic neurotransmission. In the present study, we investigated the dopaminergic genetic contribution to social cooperation, especially to social loafing and social facilitation. N = 106 healthy, Caucasian subjects participated in the study and were genotyped for three polymorphisms relevant to the dopaminergic system (COMTval158met, DRD2 c957t, DRD2 rs#2283265). In addition to a main effect indicating an increased performance in teamwork situations, we found a significant interaction between a haplotype block covering both DRD2 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (rs#6277 and rs#2283265), henceforth referred to as the DRD2-haplotype block, and the COMT val158met polymorphism (rs#4680) with social facilitation. Carriers of the DRD2 CT-haplotype block and at least one Val-allele showed a greater increase in performance in teamwork settings when compared with carriers of the CT-haplotype block and the Met/Met-genotype. Our results suggest that epistasis between COMTval158met and the two DRD2 SNPs contributes to individual differences in cooperativeness in teamwork settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. According to a recently proposed synthesis, social loafing, social facilitation, and deindividuation can be viewed as different ways of arranging social consequences (B. Guerin, 1999). The effects of such arrangements have been measured in past research as productive output (social loafing and social facilitation) or as anti-normative behaviors (deindividuation), but all 3 effects are manipulable by changing individual identifiability, evaluation, social identity, task difficulty, and presence in a group. The synthesis also predicted that these same variables would apply to other measures and other arrangements of social consequences. To this end, in the present 2 experiments, the author varied the arrangements for consequence diffusion in a competition situation by varying small and large competing groups and measured productive output and anti-normative behaviors simultaneously. The 2 experiments showed social-consequence effects in competition situations with college students, giving further support for the social-consequence synthesis and the idea that the verbal naming of phenomena in social psychology is arbitrary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on social facilitation (e.g. Harkins, 1987) has made it clear that the potential for evaluation plays a role in producing coaction effects, but has left unclear the source of these effects. Subsequent research (e.g. Szymanski & Harkins, 1987, 1993) has shown that the potential for self-evaluation and experimenter evaluation each produce performance greater than that found in a 'no evaluation' control group. However, the combination of these sources produces performance no better than either taken alone. In Experiment 1, we show that the potential for evaluation by a coactor also produces performance better than that found in a 'no evaluation' control group, and that the combination of these sources (coactor plus self) also produces performance no better than either taken alone. Experiment 2 shows that the combination of the potential for evaluation by the experimenter and a coactor does produce better performance than either source taken alone. These findings suggest that, although adding external sources of evaluation contributes to the potency of the coaction effect, adding the potential for self-evaluation to the potential for evaluation by external sources does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]