The unpacking effect in allocations of responsibility for group tasks

Abstract

Individuals tend to overestimate their relative contributions to collaborative endeavors. Thus, sum of group members! estimates of percentage they each contributed to a joint task typically exceeds logically allowable 100%. We suggest that this tendency stems partly from individuals! inclination to regard their fellow group members as a collective rather than as individuals, and that leading people to think about their collaborators as individuals should therefore reduce perceived relative magnitude of their own contributions. Consistent with this thesis, four experiments demonstrate that people!s tendency to claim more than their fair share of credit for a group task is attenuated when they unpack their collaborators, conceptualizing them as separate individuals, rather than as the rest of group.