Social facilitation
Social facilitation is a social phenomenon in which being in the presence of others improves individual task performance. That is, people do better on tasks when they are with other people rather than when they are doing the task alone. Situations that elicit social facilitation include coaction and performing for an audience, and appears to depend on task complexity.
Norman Triplett's early investigations describe social facilitation to occur during instances of coaction, which is performing a task in the presence of other people performing a similar task, while not necessarily engaging in direct interactions with each other. Triplett first observed this in cyclists, finding that cyclists rode at faster speeds when competing against other cyclists compared to when cycling alone. Social facilitation has also been known to occur when performing a task in front of an audience, or during periods of observation, sometimes referred to as audience effects. For instance, during exercise Meumann found that when being watched, individuals could lift heavier weights compared to when they were not being watched. Research on the effects of coaction and audience effects on social facilitation have been mixed. In an attempt to discover why these types of situations do not always trigger social facilitation, Robert Zajonc theorized that perhaps task complexity, or how simple versus complex a task is, could influence whether or not social facilitation occurs.
Zajonc predicted that simple tasks would result in social facilitation within group settings, whereas more complicated tasks would not. According to Zajonc, some tasks are easier to learn and perform than others because they require dominant responses. Dominant responses are behavioral responses at the top of an organism's behavioral repertoire, making them more readily available, or 'dominant', above all other responses. Tasks that elicit dominant responses are typically simpler, less effortful, and easier to perform compared to tasks eliciting non-dominant responses. Non-dominant responses are harder to carry out. In sum, simple tasks require dominant responses whereas complex tasks require non-dominant responses. When performing tasks in groups then, simple tasks will be associated with social facilitation. However, complex tasks will not because the presence of others becomes distracting when attempting to elicit non-dominant responses that require more effort to use.
Later research develops the idea of coaction, audience effects, and task complexity. For instance, the Yerkes-Dodson law, when applied to social facilitation, states that "the mere presence of other people will enhance the performance in speed and accuracy of well-practiced tasks, but will degrade in the performance of less familiar tasks." Compared to their performance when alone, when in the presence of others they tend to perform better on simple or well-rehearsed tasks and worse on complex or new ones.
The audience effect attempts to explain psychologically why the presence of an audience leads to people performing tasks better in some cases and worse in others. This idea was further explored when some studies showed that the presence of a passive audience facilitated the better performance of a simple task, while other studies showed that the presence of a passive audience inhibited the performance of a more difficult task or one that was not well practiced, possibly due to psychological pressure or stress.
Many factors contribute to social facilitation, and many theories have been proposed to try to explain the phenomena.
History
Social facilitation can be defined as a tendency for individuals to perform differently when in the mere presence of others. Specifically, individuals perform better on simpler or well-rehearsed tasks and perform worse on complex or new ones. In relation to this, there are three main empirical relationships which are the activation, evaluation, and attention theories. The activation theory describes how we are physiologically aroused and how that affects our functioning. The evaluation theory relates to the systematic assessment of the worth or merit of some object. The attention theory takes into account possession in the mind including focalization and concentration of consciousness.In 1897, Triplett studied the effect on performance of having an audience. Triplett's experiment had a simple design; a cyclist's performance when alone was compared with a cyclist's performance when racing against another cyclist. He found that the cyclist was slowest when he was only racing the clock and not another cyclist. He attributed these results to a competitive instinct which releases energy that was not available when pedaling alone. Triplett's study started off a revolution of studies attempting to examine the theory that people's performance is influenced by the presence of others. In 1898, while studying the competitive nature of children, he found that children were much faster at completing their given activity while they were competing, which caused him to wonder whether or not simply having another individual there would have the same effect. To determine this, Triplett studied the race time of cyclists and found that cyclists had faster race times when in the presence of other cyclists. He theorized that the faster times were because the presence of others made individuals more competitive, and further research led Triplett to theorize that the presence of others increases individuals' performances in other noncompetitive situations as well.
In 1924, Floyd Allport coined the term social facilitation. Allport conducted studies in which participants sat either alone or with other participants and did a variety of tasks such as word association tasks and multiplication assessments. He found that people performed better when in a group setting than when alone for the majority of tasks. However, at this time, social facilitation simply meant an "increase in response merely from the sight or sound of others making the same movement."
Hazel Markus of the University of Michigan conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis that the mere presence of others can influence an individual's performance. A task that lacked a rubric structure and was likely to cause the subject to be apprehensive of how they would be evaluated was used. Performance times on the task of dressing and undressing in familiar and unfamiliar clothing were compared with subjects working alone, working in the presence of a passive inattentive person, and working in the presence of an attentive spectator. Compared to the alone condition, both social conditions enhanced performance on the well-learned aspects of the task of dressing and undressing with the subject's own familiar clothing and hindered the subject's performance on the more complex aspects of the task of dressing and undressing using unfamiliar clothing. It was concluded that the presence of others is a sufficient condition for social facilitation and social interference effects. Therefore, the presence of an audience causes an individual to do better on a simple task or worse on a more complicated task.
In a 2010 study, donation rates increased with the presence of observers, and neuroimaging revealed that the presence of observers significantly affected activation in the ventral striatum before the choice of whether or not to donate.
In Raefeli's meta-analysis of the social facilitation phenomenon in 2002, three conclusions are made. Firstly, the presence of others heightens an individual's physiological arousal only if the individual is performing a complex task. Moreover, the mere presence of others increases the speed of simple task performance and decrease the speed of complex task performance. Lastly, social facilitation effects are surprisingly unrelated to the performer's evaluation apprehension.
A study was done in 2014 that compared the performance of individuals with autism spectrum disorder to typically developing individuals on a task with the presence of another. The experiment conducted tested the hypothesis that an individual with ASD will respond to the presence of experimenters, thus altering the results of the experiment.
Major theoretical approaches
The major three approaches to social facilitation are the activation, evaluation, and attention theories. The activation theory describes how arousal relates to social facilitation. The evaluation theory discusses how being assessed by an audience affects to social facilitation. The attention theory takes into account the effect of distractions in the environment on social facilitation.Activation theory
In 1956, Robert Zajonc was trying to figure out why some studies showed people's performance being hindered by the presence of others rather than being made more accurate. He designed an experiment that would examine the performance of someone doing a simple vs. complex task in front of others. He found that, when people were performing a simple task in the presence of others, they could complete it with greater accuracy than when they were alone. This was something most psychologists were aware of at this time. However, what Zajonc found that was revolutionary in this time period was that, when people attempt to perform tasks which are more complex or with which they are not familiar, they complete it with less accuracy when in the presence of others than when they alone. Thus, social inhibition was born.In 1965, Zajonc developed the stern activation theory, by proposing his generalized drive hypothesis for social facilitation. Zajonc's generalized drive hypothesis was the first theory that addressed why the presence of others increased performance sometimes yet decreased it at other times. He argued that the presence of others serves as a source of arousal, and heightened arousal increases the likelihood of an organism to do better on well-learned or habitual responses. For this reason, arousal improves performance on simple, or well-learned tasks, but impairs performance on complex, or not well-learned tasks. Zajonc's reasoning was based on the Yerkes-Dodson law, which holds that performance works like an inverse "U" function. This means that an individual's optimal drive is higher for simpler, or well-practiced tasks, and that the same individual's optimal drive is lower for more complex, or less-practiced tasks. The presence of other people further arouses us and increases our drive level, and so an individual's performance will be enhanced if a task is simple but diminished if the task is complex. He tested his theories by having people complete word association tasks alone and again in the presence of others, and found that the tasks were done much faster while in the presence of others.
Other activation theories include the alertness hypothesis, the monitoring hypothesis, and the challenge and threat hypothesis.