Social Facilitation, Social Loafing, and Deindividuation (7B) Practice Test

A researcher observed social loafing during a group task where individual effort could be measured. Students were asked to generate as many unique uses for a common object as possible in 10 minutes. In the “identifiable” condition, each student typed ideas into their own labeled document. In the “non-identifiable” condition, students sat together and spoke ideas that a recorder typed into a single unlabeled list; the researcher stated that only the group’s total number of unique ideas would be counted. Which pattern is most consistent with social loafing?

Researchers studied social facilitation using a simple performance task. Forty volunteers completed two 2-minute rounds of sorting mixed cards into two piles by color (a well-practiced, straightforward task). In Round 1, each participant worked alone in a quiet room. In Round 2, the same participant repeated the task while two unfamiliar observers sat behind them and silently watched. The researchers recorded the number of correctly sorted cards per round and noted that most participants increased their correct-sorts count in Round 2 compared with Round 1, with few errors in either condition. Which outcome is most consistent with social facilitation in this study?