Social loafing refers to the reduction in effort that occurs when an individual works collectively on a task compared to when working alone on a task (Karau & Williams, 1993; Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). This reduction in individual effort has been shown to result in reduced (or sub-optimal) performance/productivity levels in a wide variety of achievement settings including (but not limited to) business/workplace teams, classroom tasks in academe, and physical/athletic performance tasks (for reviews see Hardy, 1990; Karau & Williams, 1993; Simms & Nichols, 2014). Understanding the impact of social loafing upon performance, the reasons why social loafing occurs, and methods by which social loafing can be reduced is particularly relevant in the context of interactive team sports (e.g., soccer, hockey, or basketball) where athletes trust and rely upon teammates to give maximum effort towards the achievement of team goals (both in training and competition). Even a small amount of social loafing in interactive team sports, especially at elite levels of competition, has the potential to jeopardize a team's chances of attaining competitive success (see Hardy, 1990; Hoigaard, Fuglestad, Peters, De Cuyper, De Backer, & Boen, 2010). Numerous studies have examined social-loafing effects in physical (athletic) performance tasks. The majority of these studies have been conducted in coactive team/group contexts where the overall performance of teams is dependent upon the summation of individual performances (but where no specific interaction between team members is necessary: e.g., a swimming relay race). Coactive activities that have been used to study social-loafing effects in physical (athletic) performance tasks have included running (Swain, 1996), rowing (Anshel, 1995; Hardy & Crace, 1991), swimming (Williams, Nida, Baca, & Latane, 1989), and cycling (Haugen, Reinboth, Hetlelid, Peters, & Hoigaard, 2016). In these studies, effort/performance is typically assessed through objective measures of time/speed, distance travelled, and/or power output. The results of these studies have revealed drops in individual performance levels (e.g., reduced speed, reduced distance travelled, reduced power output) when the identifiability of each individual participant's performance was reduced (e.g., participants were informed that their individual performance was to be subsumed within an overall measure of group/team performance) in comparison to when the identifiability of each participant's performance was increased (e.g., participants were informed that their individual performance was to be directly recorded and publicly evaluated).
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