With a Little Help from My Friend

The study of social loafing was extended to artistic creativity using the catalogue of 162 Lennon-McCartney songs. Although all songs were jointly credited, most were actually individually authored. Jointly authored songs with low author identifiability were predicted to reflect less effort than individually authored songs with high identifiability. Analysis showed support for the predictions; jointly authored songs were found to be lower in quality than identifiable individually authored songs. A significantly lower proportion of jointly authored songs were selected for 45 rpm singles than identifiable solo-authored songs, and of those selected, jointly authored songs tended to be of lower popularity. Alternative explanations of the social loafing effect involving the type of task and coordination loss are discussed.