The earliest published research on social facilitation was conducted by Norman Triplett in 1898. He found that among bicycle racers, cyclist tended to increase their performance when in the presence of other cyclists. This shows that fellow competitors cause facilitation among themselves by just performing with each other. In 1965, Robert Zajonc attempted to explain social facilitation in more detail. He produced a model to explain how an audience causes facilitation and inhibition, calling it the Drive Theory. This suggested that the presence of others causes a degree of arousal and this is what aids and interferes with our performance. An example of this would be a good tennis player being observed by an audience causing arousal levels to increase and therefore their effort too, making him or her play better. A bad tennis player being observed however, would be inhibited because they would begin worrying too much about doing badly. Zajonc’s (1965) hypothesis is supported by experiments he and others conducted on pool players. An audience of four watched good pool players, whose accuracy rose from 71 to 80 percent, whilst the poor pool players became even worse as their accuracy levels dropped from 35 to 25 percent. Social facilitation has been demonstrated by Zajonc and others in a wide range of species, including roaches, laboratory rats, ants, chicks and humans.
Yerkes- Dodson Law developed by Robert Yerkes and J.D Dodson in 1908, dictates what Zajonc added to social facilitation research. It also states that performance increases with physiological and mental arousal, but that when the levels become too high performance decreases. Research has found that different levels of arousal are required for difficult tasks, in order for there to be optimal performance. For example, tasks demanding stamina or persistence may be performed better with higher levels of arousal, as this is more than likely to increase motivation. Whereas an intellectually difficult task may require a lower level of arousal, so that the performer can facilitate concentration. But Zajonc’s Drive Theory has been criticized as it is only based on the presence of the audience, and no interaction between the audience and performer is included.
Another model which has extended Zajonc’s work is the Evaluation Apprehension; this was introduced to social facilitation theories by Cottrell (1972). He agrees that people are aroused in the presence of others but suggests that this is due to our need for social approval, or perceived rewards rather than punishment. The performer is aware of the audience and their effort is influenced by the judgments they perceive the audience to be making about their performance. The kind of arousal this situation produces is known as Evaluation Apprehension, and it may be justifiable to believe that this is what causes differences in performance when an audience is present. Support for this theory comes from one experiment by Cottrell et al, (1968). An audience was made up of blindfolded or inattentive people who were merely present; this was so that it would be very unlikely for them to produce severe apprehension or arousal. These studies had shown no facilitation when the audience was not attentive to the performer’s behavior, but facilitation when they were. Therefore if the audience did not see the performance or did not care about his or her performance, evaluation apprehension and both social facilitation and inhibition would not occur. This strongly supports the idea that social facilitation is the result of feeling observed, as it did not occur due to the mere presence of an audience but did when the audience was attentive.
More recently Baron (1986) suggested that cognitive processes, such as attention and distraction in a situation influences performance. A theory which supports Baron’s suggestion is Distraction Conflict Theory, which was put forward by Saunders et al (1978). This is when for example, a person is performing a task and the mere presence of others creates conflict between concentrating on the task and concentrating on the other people. This conflict is thought to increase arousal which leads to social facilitation.
Social facilitation has been shown to be the result of feeling observed but many factors may influence this, as it may depend on the individual’s perception of the audience. There may be a number of causal factors for this process, such as mere presence, evaluation apprehension, competition and cognitive processes, such as attention and distraction. The evaluation apprehension model shows that social facilitation is not the result of the audience being present, it is the result of ‘feeling’ observed, because the audience has to be attentive. Each model has introduced different factors into why and how an audience causes social facilitation, but whether the feeling of being observed causes arousal through conflict or arousal through worry it is clear that feeling observed results in social facilitation.
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References
Gleitman, H. (1991). Psychology. W W Norton & Co Ltd (3rd ed.)
