AI can cause 'social loafing' at work: How robots impact workplaces

Anything you can do, a robot could, too — and it could make people lazier.

The corporate phenomenon known as “social loafing” — when a colleague doesn’t work as hard because others will pick up the slack — occurs most commonly in groups of humans whether it be in the office or on a school project. But as robotics have slowly been integrated into the workplace, researchers investigated its prevalence between humans and automated technology, finding that humans exerted less effort when they could rely on robots to complete their tasks in a group setting.

“Teamwork is a mixed blessing,” study author Dietlind Helene Cymek said in a statement. “Working together can motivate people to perform well, but it can also lead to a loss of motivation because the individual contribution is not as visible.” The study, published Wednesday in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, tested the productivity of 42 participants, who were asked to rate their effort and performance after the experiment, by looking at a circuit board for errors for 90 minutes.

Half the participants were told their boards had already been inspected by Panda, a robot, but did not work directly with the machine. While the time spent inspecting the boards did not differ between the two groups observed, participants who worked with Panda caught fewer errors and seemed “to have looked for defects less attentively than the participants who worked alone.”