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By Root 1892 0

help deprived children in all African nations”)—still look quite puzzling. Were one to evaluate the effectiveness of this group’s efforts based on its immense potential (having access to 1.7 million people who self-identify as interested in helping the cause) the assessment wouldn’t be too kind. Surely even a dozen people working on their own would be able to raise more than $12,000 in the few years that have passed since the group’s founding. Is there a danger that the popularity of Facebook might nudge activists toward embracing some kind of “group fetishism,” in which they opt for a group solution to problems that could be solved much faster and better by solo artists? Now that almost every problem could be tackled by collective action rather than individually, is there a risk that a collective urge might also delay the solution?

Before the Silicon Valley crowd went gung-ho about the wisdom of crowds, social psychologists and management experts were already studying conditions under which individuals who work as groups may be less effective than the same individuals working solo. One of the first people to discover and theorize this discrepancy was the French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann.

In 1882 Ringelmann conducted an experiment in which he asked four individuals to pull on a rope, first alone and then in groups, and then compared the results. The rope was attached to a strain gauge so it was possible to measure the pull force. To Ringelmann’s surprise, the total pull force of the group pull was consistently less than the sum of the individual pull forces, even as he adjusted the number of individuals participating in the experiment. What has become known as the Ringelmann Effect is thus the opposite of synergy.

In the century that has passed since Ringelmann’s original experiment, plenty of other tests have proven that we usually put much less effort into a task when other people are also doing it alongside us. In fact, calling it the Ringelmann Effect is only adding theoretical luster to what we already knew intuitively. We don’t have to make fools of ourselves by singing “Happy Birthday” at the top of our lungs; others will do the job just fine. Nor do we always clap our hands as loudly as we could—much to the disappointment of performers. The logic is clear: When everyone in the group performs the same mundane tasks, it’s impossible to evaluate individual contributions, and people inevitably begin slacking off (it’s for this reason that another name for this phenomenon is “social loafing”). Increasing the number of participants diminishes the relative social pressure on each and often results in inferior outputs.

Hearing of Ringelmann’s experiments today, one can’t help noticing the parallels to much of today’s Facebook activism. With the power of Facebook and Twitter at their fingertips, many activists may choose to tackle a problem collectively when tackling it individually would make more strategic sense. But just as “the madness of crowds” gives rise to “the wisdom of crowds” only under certain, carefully delineated social conditions, “social loafing” leads to synergy only once certain conditions are met (it’s possible to monitor and evaluate individual contributions, and the group members are aware that such evaluation is going on; tasks to be performed are unique and difficult, etc.) When such conditions are missing, pursuing a political end collectively rather than individually is no more desirable than choosing what to have for breakfast by polling one’s neighbors. It’s certainly possible for a group to meet all the conditions, but it often takes a lot of effort, leadership, and ingenuity. This is why effective social movements don’t spring up in a day.

But Facebook simply does not provide for the kind of flexibility that this requires. Once we join a Facebook group to fight for a cause, we move at the group’s own pace, even though we could be much more effective fighting on our own. Our contributions to achieving the group’s stated objectives are hard to verify, so we may join as many as we