Max Ringelmann

With that as my experience and focus, I was quite surprised as I began reading a post by Jeff Matlow titled The Problem With Being a Team Player.

Matlow describes something known as the Ringelmann effect.

It's named after the original researcher, and sometimes it's called social loafing.

The research suggested that people may reduce their effort when working in a group if they believe their individual contribution is neither identifiable or valued.

To know that just one person relies on us and depends on us is a crucial factor in mental health, in our mental health and overall well-being.

And why is that? Well, one of my favorite experiments is from Max Ringelmann.

He was a French agricultural engineer in 1913.

He had individual students pull on a rope as hard as they could, and he attached that rope to this device.

So that everybody understands what their contribution is.

Recently, like last week, I was doing some reading and came across a psychological phenomena called the Ringelmann effect.

See, as the size of a group grows, the effort of each person tends to go down.

They actually did this test where they had one person, the scientist hooked up a rope to a meter, and they had one person pull against that rope as hard as they possibly could, and they measured it.

The user may be, but the calculator most certainly is not.

And as I allude to this coming AI apocalypse and all of your tax dollars being sucked in to, to, uh, make Sam Altman and friends richer, I want to tell you about a French engineer named Max Ringelmann.

Back in nineteen thirteen, over a hundred years ago, the guy got curious about something simple, tug-of-war.

He had people pull a rope by themselves and measured their strength.

They weren't faking an injury.

They just coasted.

Ringelmann called it what it is.

When we're in a group, we slack off.