Another way in which a group presence can affect performance is social loafing—the exertion of less effort by a person working together with a group. Social loafing occurs when our individual performance cannot be evaluated separately from the group. Thus, group performance declines on easy tasks (Karau & Williams, 1993). Essentially individual group members loaf and let other group members pick up the slack. Because each individual’s efforts cannot be evaluated, individuals become less...

Werner Heisenberg considered the limits of how accurately one can measure properties of an electron or other microscopic particles. He determined that there is a fundamental limit to how accurately one can measure both a particle’s position and its momentum simultaneously. The more accurate the measurement of the momentum of a particle is known, the less accurate the position at that time is known and vice versa. This is what is now called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He mathematically...

A household microwave and lasers are examples of standing electromagnetic waves in a cavity. When two conducting metal plates are placed parallel at the nodal planes, it creates a cavity where standing waves are formed. The cavity between the two planes is analogous to a stretched string held at the points x = 0 and x = L. Here, the distance 'L' between the two planes must be an integer multiple of half of the wavelength. The wavelengths that satisfy this condition are given by:

The population standard deviation is rarely known in many day-to-day examples of statistics. When the sample sizes are large, it is easy to estimate the population standard deviation using a confidence interval, which provides results close enough to the original value. However, statisticians ran into problems when the sample size was small. A small sample size caused inaccuracies in the confidence interval.
The Student t distribution was developed by William S. Goset (1876–1937) of the...

The deflection of a simply supported beam that carries a central point load can be analyzed using structural mechanics principles, particularly by applying Castigliano's theorem. This theorem relates the displacement at the load application point to the partial derivatives of the strain energy in the structure. The simply supported beam with a point load at its center has symmetric reaction forces at the supports, each bearing half of the load. The bending moment at any point along the beam is...

The famous and controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University, demonstrated the power of social roles, social norms, and scripts.