Someone always has to be the loafer... beware major complaining coming!!

I am more than sure that at some point in time we have all been stuck with a sucky group partner, well last year I was lucky enough to get stuck with TWO slacking sucky partners. Of course they will remain anonymous so I will refer to the crazy one as Thing 1 and the I have better things to do lazy one as Thing 2. Just to give you a little background on the situation, there were four of us in the group and we had to run an experiment for research methods. We of course had to start with brainstorming and basic research to find a topic, well me and Bernie would be the only ones who would bring actual literature to the meetings and sometimes thing 2 would say she read some stuff and had ideas but she never had the actual literature with her so that was obviously a problem. It was like from the start they were going to throw out random ideas and hope that other people in the group would bring it all together, now I'm a leader and I have no problem doing so but I am NOT willing to do an entire project for other people. Throughout the entire semester (yes Dr.G is that hardcore and we do a huge project that takes up your WHOLE life) it was one thing after the other, people making excuses and constantly blaming things on other people, especially thing 1. There were even instances were both thing 1 & 2 told me they just did not have time for it, or flat out that they did not care as much as I did and sleep was more important. They were able to do this because they knew that Bernie and I are not the kind of people to let things not get done, and as much of a toll it took on our lives someone had to do it and it was more than clear they were not going to push to get things done. Throughout the entire process it was everyone relating all of their problems to me "Cheyenne fix this" "Cheyenne I messed this up what should we do?" and because no one was talking to anyone else it all ended up on me and MAYBE the person relaying the problems to me. After awhile it became too much and I reached out to both Bernie and Dr.G to say look this is the real deal and how people are being this is CRAZY (literally the girl was insane like having mental problems idk). So Bernie and I pushed through it and ended up with a decent experiment. You are probably thinking wtf? how did they scrape by with this, well they didnt really scrape by their inability to contribute was not only recognized but not tolerated (still sorry for getting in an yelling argument in your class Dr.G) but they felt they could and basically did get away with it because of social loafing (Latane, 1979). Social loafing  is when people are working towards a common goal in a group and one or a few slack off and do not effectively contribute because they feel that it is unnecessary for two reasons. The first is the free riding (DeRosa et. al., 2007), which is when people believe that everyone else is doing more than enough work so there is no reason for them to work super hard too. The second is the sucker effect (Houldsworth & Mathews, 2000) which is when people feel like because they are in a group they should not have to take on too much of a burden and that other people should do lots of work and not just them . So in my situation it was apparent from the beginning that both Bernie and myself are the kind of people who get things done so these other girls knew right off the back that if they didn't want to that they could slack off and that the project would still get done and be great. As for the sucker effect, i have no idea where these girls were getting it from but they were like delirious they legitimately thought they were doing all the work and that they should stop doing so much because they knew that so and so wasn't doing as much as them and that was unfair, when reality neither thing 1 or 2 was doing that much at all and even when they were contributing only a part of the time was it helpful, most of the time it was either wrong or not really help at all. Basically, in all group situations we try to get by with doing as little as possible, whether it be because we are not that interested or we are very busy with other things, but there is only so much a person can refuse to do (and they did refuse to do basic and necessary things) and put on other people. I guess for me I know I can handle stressful situations and still get things done so from the beginning I was way too relaxed about the direction the group was moving in but there is only so much myself and another person can do, especially when thing 1 and 2 were not even that concerned with Dr.G and their grades (mostly thing 1). Sometimes you get a rotten apple and you just have to go with it and try to make the best apple pie you can, but damn two bad apples?? there is only so much a person can do, my advice say screw them early on and break off and do the project with just the other productive person and yourself and leave those two slackers to fend for themselves. Im sure you can think of situations where you were in my shoes or even were in thing 1 & 2's, its a natural thing to want to slack but lets stay responsible people. Just to add its kinda funny I had thing 2 in another group during the middle of this experiment (so things were bad but not at their worse yet) and I immediately was like i relinquish all leading abilities I think thing 2 should do it, and of course because I was having to ride her ass in the other project she would like try to ride my ass about stuff and I was like heck no shut it down. So I slacked alittle more than I would usually, I still wrote 13 freakin pages of the dumbest crap ever but I gave it to her late just to spite her lol, I know sounds bad but if you were there you are probably thinking I wouldve done worse. 

This has NOTHING to do with my blog but its freakin hilarious and everyone loves alittle animal humor so enjoy... you may want to watch multiple times to catch all the funny components (his facial expressions, the cat, his tone of voice etc.)

Citation:

Latané, B., Williams, K., & Harkins, S. (1979). Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 37(6), 822-832. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.37.6.822

DeRosa, D. M., Smith, C. L., & Hantula, D. A. (2007). The medium matters: Mining the long-promised merit of group interaction in creative idea generation tasks in a meta-analysis of the electronic group brainstorming literature. Computers In Human Behavior,23(3), 1549-1581. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2005.07.003

Houldsworth, C., & Mathews, B. P. (2000). Group composition, performance and educational attainment. Education & Training, 42(1), 40-53. doi:10.1108/00400910010317086