For weaver ants, unity is super strength

Max Ringelmann (1861-1931) was never considered an insect specialist. An agricultural engineer, he was passionate about human agricultural work. And it was in the field of social psychology that he achieved fame. In a tug-of-war experiment conducted in 1913, he showed that the strength of a group of six farmers was not double that of a group of three. And far from it. More broadly, he established that the larger the group, the less hard each person pulled. The "Ringelmann effect" was born.

The French researcher provided several explanations. One, of a physical nature, was due to coordination difficulties; the others, psychological, were linked to the lack of motivation, the lack of visibility of the objectives to be achieved or even to the impact of the collective, each person adapting – downwards – their efforts to the supposed efforts of their neighbor. In the wake of Henry Ford, an entire school of economics adapted the organization of work to this supposed “social lounging” . Its opponents, on the contrary, accused it of treating humans “like ants” .

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