Why finding out that everyone is doing the same thing kills your focus, seen through psychology and management theory

Introduction

You are working on an assignment, studying, or doing your job, and then you find out that everyone around you is doing exactly the same thing. Something drains away in that moment, and you stop feeling like the one doing it. Has that happened to you?

For me, three situations come to mind. My high school was one of those Japanese schools that markets itself as college-prep on the strength of a middling ranking, and homework was managed with something close to military discipline. At university, everyone in my department studied the same material. Then I joined a company as a new graduate and was assigned to operations and maintenance work: running through runbooks that anyone could follow.

At the time I filed these away as three separate experiences. Looking back, though, all three were situations where I was never really able to focus. The feeling of not being the one doing the work, which I had in all three, turned out to be one psychological mechanism showing up in three different shapes.

In this post I want to work through that phenomenon using theory from psychology and management studies: why it happens, and what you can do about it.

Here is what this post covers:

TL;DR
1. What social loafing is
2. A deeper cause, from self-determination theory
3. Learned helplessness piles on
4. What a homogenized university structure does
5. The working-world version: the structural problem with operations work and runbooks
6. The root they all share: an absent sense of agency
7. What to do about it
Wrap-up
References

TL;DR

Do the same thing as a group and individual effort becomes invisible, which makes it easy to slack off (social loafing)
Assignments imposed from outside create a sense of being made to do things, and take away autonomy (self-determination theory)
Work with near-zero autonomy or feedback structurally cannot generate motivation (Job Characteristics Model)
What all of these share is the absence of a sense of agency: the feeling that you are the one acting
This is a problem of environment rather than willpower, so you get it back by designing the environment

Social loafing is the phenomenon where people put in less effort working as a group than they do working alone. Ringelmann reported it from his tug-of-war experiments (published in 1913), which is why it is also called the Ringelmann effect. The larger the group, the more each individual’s effort drops off.

There are three main causes.

Reduced evaluation potential: once you realize your effort and results are not being assessed individually, you unconsciously conclude that trying hard and not trying hard come out about the same
Dispensability of effort: expecting that someone else will handle it, you start to feel that the overall result would not change even if you eased off
Conformity in slacking off: learning that nobody else is working above a certain level makes holding yourself to a higher standard feel faintly ridiculous, and you drift down to the level around you

On top of this, sinking into a group draws attention away from you as an individual, which makes it harder to sustain a sense of tension and concentration. This is sometimes described as diffusion of attention.

2. A deeper cause, from self-determination theory

Social loafing alone, though, does not fully explain the apathy you feel in a tightly controlled educational environment. What helps here is self-determination theory, proposed by Deci and Ryan.

The theory identifies three basic psychological needs that determine the quality of a person’s motivation.

Autonomy: the sense that nobody is forcing you, and that you are choosing your own actions
Competence: the sense that you are interacting effectively with your environment
Relatedness: the sense of being connected to others

Teaching styles are classified as either autonomy-supportive or controlling. Controlling teaching pressures learners into specific behaviors. Imposing a large volume of identical assignments and managing students like a military unit — the style of my high school — is a textbook example.

You did not choose the assignment, and every classmate is forced through the same volume of the same material. The sense of being made to do it grows, and you come to see the origin of your actions as external — the school, the teacher — rather than yourself. Let that run long enough and only extrinsic motivation still works, which locks in a structure where you cannot keep up any effort without a reward such as grades or university admission.

3. Learned helplessness piles on

Excessively strict management tends to bring on learned helplessness as well. Learned helplessness is the psychological state where repeated experiences of failure or difficulty teach you that nothing you do matters, and you stop taking initiative or attempting anything.

In an environment saturated with instructions, you lose the sense that your own actions control outcomes — the sense of competence. The feeling that nothing you do will make a difference then eats away at both motivation and the instinct to find better ways of doing things.

The awkward part is how the fact that everyone is being put through the same volume of work justifies that helplessness as not-my-problem-specifically. The result is that giving up gets easier still.

4. What a homogenized university structure does

A university department where everyone studies the same material already satisfies the conditions for social loafing: individual contribution and effort are hard to identify and assess. Conformity through comparison then gets added on top.

When everyone around you is moving through the same curriculum at the same pace, it becomes hard to see why you would need to pull ahead here. The opportunities to differentiate yourself, which is how you earn a sense of competence, become hard to see as well.

Self-determination theory holds that competence comes from the sense of interacting effectively with your environment. In an environment where everyone is moving through identical work on an identical yardstick, the bar for getting that sense goes up.

5. The working-world version: the structural problem with operations work and runbooks

Losing any sense of ownership in the operations and maintenance work I was assigned as a new graduate — running through runbooks anyone could follow — comes from the same root.

This one can be explained with Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model, a management theory about how the design of a job itself affects intrinsic motivation.

The model identifies five core job characteristics that determine intrinsic motivation.

Skill variety: whether the work demands a range of different skills and abilities. Work that consists of running through runbooks has essentially none
Task identity: whether you handle a whole, coherent piece of work with a clear beginning and end
Task significance: whether you can feel that your work has a clear effect on other people or the organization
Autonomy: how much freedom you have to decide how, in what order, and when to do the work. Operations work that requires strictly following runbooks is structurally low here
Feedback: whether you get clear information about the results of your work

These five are combined into the Motivating Potential Score (MPS). The important part is that the calculation is not a simple sum. Skill variety, task identity, and task significance are averaged, and then that average is multiplied by autonomy and by feedback.

So however high the first three run, if either autonomy or feedback is near zero, the whole MPS collapses. Work defined as strictly following a runbook anyone could follow is precisely the case where autonomy is pinned near zero.

Losing my sense of ownership in that work was not a failure of willpower. It was the predictable result of being placed, by the design of the job, in a state where intrinsic motivation had no way to arise.

Social loafing, controlling teaching, learned helplessness, a collapsed MPS. Lined up as four theories, it is still hard to see that they are the same problem underneath. The concept that unifies them is sense of agency.

Sense of agency refers to the feeling that you are the one performing an action, that your intention is driving your behavior and producing change in the world. It is not merely a mood: it functions as an internal reward that motivates the choice and execution of action in the first place. That is exactly why, as your sense of agency fades, ownership and concentration fall away with it.

A related concept is locus of control. It distinguishes an internal locus, where you believe your actions influence outcomes, from an external locus, where you believe outcomes are decided by luck or outside forces. Research shows that people with a stronger internal locus tend to have higher academic performance and motivation. A strong external locus works the other way: the sense that nothing you do will change anything lowers your appetite for sustained action.

Reread the four theories through sense of agency and they line up like this.

Social loafing: you sink into the group, and the sense that you were the one who did it thins out
Controlling teaching (autonomy in self-determination theory): the sense of choosing and acting for yourself is taken away outright
Learned helplessness: a complete collapse of agency — your actions cannot change the outcome
Autonomy in the Job Characteristics Model: the absence of any sense that you control how the work gets done

What the managed homework, the uniform curriculum, and the runbook job had in common is that the origin of the action was always external: the school, the curriculum, the manual. My intentions and judgments could barely touch the outcome.

Sense of agency is thought to arise from experiencing a match between the outcome you predicted and the outcome you got. But when the work is just following a runbook, how you judge things does not affect the result to begin with. There is no room to experience that match or mismatch at all, so agency has nothing to grow from.

7. What to do about it

This is not a problem of weak willpower. It is a psychological and structural mechanism that depends on conditions — which is exactly why designing the environment is the effective response.

Redefine the assignment or the job as something you chose rather than something you were handed. Picking the subject of a personal project maps directly onto this
Externalize your progress and results somewhere identifiable — a blog, a portfolio — so that competence becomes visible
Measure against your past self and the goals you set yourself, rather than against the people around you
Even in runbook-driven work, look for room to manufacture autonomy, skill variety, and feedback yourself: improvement proposals, automation scripts, that kind of thing
Deliberately increase the number of times you experience your own judgment changing an outcome. Taking back small decisions — which tool, which implementation approach — is the most direct route back to a sense of agency

Even if a controlled education and a controlled job have worn away your sense of autonomy over many years, the pattern can be overwritten. Personal projects, learning topics you chose, visible output, discretion to improve how work is done: staying in environments where you can deliberately reclaim autonomy is how you do it.

Wrap-up

Factor	Where it showed up	Mechanism	Relationship to sense of agency
Social loafing	High school, university, group work generally	Individual contribution sinks into the group and goes unassessed, so the motive to try drops	The sense that you did it thins out
Controlling teaching (self-determination theory)	Managed homework in high school	Autonomy is removed, locking in dependence on extrinsic motivation	Self-determination itself is stripped away
Learned helplessness	Excessive management in high school	The sense that effort is pointless gets reinforced	Complete collapse of agency
A homogenized curriculum	A single university department	Fewer chances to differentiate, so competence is harder to earn	Lost opportunity to act distinctively
A collapsed MPS (Job Characteristics Model)	Operations work as a new graduate	No autonomy, skill variety, or feedback, so intrinsic motivation never arises	A structure where judgment does not affect outcomes

Stack these together and the moment you notice that everyone is doing the same thing, or that you are only tracing predetermined steps, the necessity of effort, your sense of competence, and your autonomy all wobble at once. Ownership and concentration drop sharply as a result.

In education and at work alike, what sits underneath is the same single thing: an absent sense of agency. Running into the same feeling across high school, university, and working life was no coincidence. It was the result of staying, throughout, in environments where I could not be the one doing the acting.

References

“Social loafing” (in Japanese)
Latané et al., “Many Hands Make Light the Work: The Causes and Consequences of Social Loafing”
“What is social loafing? Examples and countermeasures” (in Japanese)
J-STAGE, “Examining the relationship between autonomy support, basic psychological needs, and agentic engagement” (in Japanese)
Mitsubishi Research Institute HR Compass, “Learned helplessness” (in Japanese)
“From studying because you are told to, to studying as your own: changing exam preparation at the root through self-determination” (in Japanese)
“What is self-determination theory? The three basic needs and their relationship to motivation” (in Japanese)
Hackman & Oldham (1976), “Motivation through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory”
WFM Labs, “The Job Characteristics Model”
“Job Characteristics Model: 5 Core Dimensions, MPS Formula, and examples”
Japan Women’s University psychology column, “Sense of agency: the feeling that you are the one doing it” (in Japanese)
J-STAGE, “Developing a scale to measure sense of agency and exploring its factor structure” (in Japanese)
“Locus of Control”
BetterUp, “Locus of Control: What It Is and How It Shapes Motivation”