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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,...
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Social psychologists analyze how groups influence one another, shaping social structures and interactions through both cooperation and competition. These dynamics manifest in various ways, ranging from economic partnerships to intergroup conflicts that shape societal structures and perceptions.Cooperation and Competition in Intergroup RelationsIntergroup relationships vary across contexts, sometimes fostering cooperation and mutual benefit while at other times leading to conflict and...
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Updated: Oct 21, 2025

Group Synchronization During Collaborative Drawing Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy
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Task complexity moderates group synergy.

Abdullah Almaatouq1, Mohammed Alsobay2, Ming Yin3

  • 1Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139; amaatouq@mit.edu.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|September 4, 2021
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Interacting groups outperform individuals on complex tasks, offering faster, more efficient, and higher-quality solutions. Group dynamics shift, with gains outweighing losses at higher task complexity.

Keywords:
collective intelligencecomplexityproblem-solvingteam performance

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Area of Science:

  • Social Psychology
  • Cognitive Science
  • Organizational Behavior

Background:

  • Task complexity is crucial for group performance but poorly understood due to measurement challenges.
  • Existing research lacks a clear framework for comparing task complexity across diverse group activities.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To systematically investigate the impact of varying task complexity on group performance.
  • To quantify group process losses and synergistic gains in relation to task complexity.
  • To compare the solution generation, exploration, and quality of interacting groups versus independent individuals.

Main Methods:

  • Developed a novel task class allowing systematic variation of complexity while keeping other factors constant.
  • Conducted a two-phase preregistered experiment with 1,200 participants.
  • Phase 1: Individual task evaluation; Phase 2: Random assignment to interacting groups or independent problem-solving.

Main Results:

  • Interacting groups matched the fastest individuals and exceeded the most efficient individuals in speed and efficiency for complex tasks.
  • The balance between group process losses and synergistic gains shifted at intermediate task complexity levels.
  • Groups generated more solutions faster, explored the solution space more broadly, and found higher-quality solutions than most individuals.

Conclusions:

  • Task complexity significantly modulates the performance benefits of group interaction.
  • Interacting groups offer distinct advantages over individual problem-solving for complex tasks, particularly in solution diversity and quality.
  • Understanding the interplay between task complexity and group dynamics is key to optimizing collaborative performance.