Group remembering: does social loafing underlie collaborative inhibition?

Abstract

When people collaborate to recall information, they experience collaborative inhibition, a deficit in recall relative to nominal groups (the pooled, nonredundant recall of individuals working alone). That is, people recalling in groups do not perform up to their potential. Collaborative inhibition may be due to retrieval interference (e.g., B. H. Basden, D. R. Basden, S. Bryner, & R. L. Thomas, 1997) or to motivational factors such as social loafing in the group situation. Five experiments examined the role of motivational factors by varying monetary incentives, recall criterion, personal accountability, group cohesion, and group gender. Increasing motivation sometimes increased the overall level of recall but failed to eliminate the collaborative inhibition effect. The results suggest that collaboration interferes with an individual's ability to reconstruct his or her knowledge.