Describe and discuss social facilitation theory. Refer to empirical evidence in your answer.

Facilitation of dominant responses is the tendency for the most likely responses to be produced more frequently when in the presence of others. Michaels et al tested the prediction that the presence of an audience would facilitate the performance of a well-learned behaviour and inhibits the performance of poorly practice ones. Pool player were observed from a distance in a college student union either average or below average. Researchers recorded the number of successful shots by six identified as average and six identified as below average. At the stage the players did not know that they were being observed. Four researchers then walked up to the tables of the players so that it was obvious that they were observing their game. The result is the player identified as average in ability increased their shot accuracy by 9 per cent whereas those were below average showed a decrease of 11 per cent in shot accuracy when watched. The conclusion is the presence of an audience results in social facilitation when the task is well known but social inhibition when the task is more difficult.

Most explanations of social facilitation focus on the concept of arousal. Social facilitation can be explained by the presence of others causing an increase in arousal. The increase in arousal pushes the level up to a point where the performance is greatest. The level of arousal at which performance is greatest is usually referred to as optimum level. This optimum level will vary according the task. A new or complex task will have a lower optimum level than a well-learned or easy task. Therefore the increase in arousal caused by the presence of others may take the arousal about the optimum level for a new task hence leading to a decline in performance. However, individual differences in optimum level of arousal also affect the performance of introverts and extroverts both alone and in the presence of others.

Evaluation apprehension is the reason that the presence of other people affects our performance is because we are concerned that they might be evaluating us. When we are evaluated on a well-learned task the arousal produced leads to an improvement in performance. However if the task is either new or complex then added pressure of our performance being evaluated is more likely to result in a decline in performance. In Bartis et al’s case study, they simply looked at whether or not apprehension o being evaluated would lead to improvement on a simple task and poorer performance on a more complex task. They found that the simple task with evaluation condition has increase the performance than in the simple and non-evaluated condition. In the complex task with evaluation condition has produced fewer creative ideas which leads to a decrease in performance than the complex and non-evaluation condition.

The distraction conflict theory suggests that the presence of others is distracting because attention is divided between the task and the audience or co-actor. Sanders et al has investigate whether distraction would result in social facilitation on a simple task and social inhibition on a complex task. The result supported the distraction condition made more mistakes on the complex task but copied more digits correctly on the simple task than in the other two-co action condition. The dependent variable was measured by the number of mistakes made. The distraction conflict theory can be applied to any distracting stimulus. Experiments show that any form of distraction, for example noise, movement, not only social presence, can cause social facilitation.