D:S, what a great spring break

When you drive 18 college students over 750 miles to the middle of the wilderness, you’re destined to notice multiple social theories, especially if these students are to work together for an entire week in the middle of the wilderness with no electricity (yeah, no facebook or internet and certainly no cell phone service) and no running water (no flushing toilets and no showers). Southwestern does just that with their Destination: Service opportunity during spring break. This year, I joined 17 other students and 2 faculty leaders on the 750 mile drive to Gila National Wilderness Forest near Silver City, New Mexico. We helped the national forest service restore trails and created new trails in our four days of work.

What is interesting is that this environment facilitated bonding among complete strangers. Members were cohesive, predominately because the task they had before them was meaningful and important to the individuals and we all believed that our own efforts were needed for a successful outcome. This simple matter that the task we were performing as a group was important to us as individuals and we each believed we played an important role in the success of our efforts, greatly helped decrease social loafing (Karau & Williams, 1993). Social Loafing, as described by Latane et al (1979) is a theory in which individuals, in a group setting decrease their individual contribution on easy tasks.

One commonly sees, in situations of social loafing, that one person may have a mind set that goes along the lines of, “I don’t have to work too hard because other people are working” as seen with free riders (Nijstad et al., 2003). A person may also fall to the sucker effect (Houldswroth & Matthew, 2000, Kerr, 1983; Shepperd, 1993a) in which he or she does not want to be the “sucker” who works too much, while everyone else does very little. Thankfully, because of our cohesiveness, Gilans (as we now proudly call ourselves) did not fall prey to social loafing. In turn, I feel like many of us engaged in social compensation (Karau & Williams, 2001); we, as individuals, each increased our own efforts on our group tasks to compensate for others who were going to socially loaf. As a result of our group’s social compensation, we did in a day and a half, what the forest rangers expected us to do in an entire week of work.



Will helping me cross the river (This is after Zach and I had rescued Caroline from falling. . .and being taken away by the Gila RIver)



Gilans on Destination: Service 2010!!!


Houldswroth, C., & Matthews, B.P. (2000). Group composition, performance and educational attainment. Education and Training, 42, 40-53.

Karau, S. J., & Williams, K.D. (1993). Social loafing: a metaanalytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65: 681-706.

Karau, S.J., & Willimas, K.D. (2001). Understanding individual motivation in groups: The collective effort model. In M.E. Turner (ed.) Groups at work: Theory and research. Applied social research (pp. 113-141). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Kerr, N.L. (1983). Motivation losses in small groups: A social dilemma analysis. Journal of Personality and Socialy Psychology, 45, 819-828.

Latane, B., Williams, K., & Harkins, S. (1979).Many hands makelight the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 822-832.

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Shepperd, J.A. (1993a). Productivity loss in performance groups. A motivation analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 113, 67-81.