Many Hands Make Overlooked Work: Overclaiming of Responsibility Increases with Group Size

Abstract

Logically, group members cannot be responsible for more than 100% of the group’s actions, and yet group members’ claims of responsibility often sum to more than 100%. We predicted that this “overclaiming” of responsibility would increase with group size. In two field studies, participants claimed more responsibility as the number of academic authors per article (re- analysis of Caruso et al., 2006) and number of MBA students per study group (Study 1) increased. This relationship between group size and overclaiming diminished significantly when group members first considered others’ contributions explicitly. We replicated this pattern after experimentally manipulating group size in a laboratory task (Study 2). Group members tend to assess responsibility by focusing on their own contributions and overlooking others’ contributions, a tendency that exacerbates overclaiming as the number of others to overlook increases. Members of larger groups may be particularly well- advised to consider other members’ contributions before considering their own.