Floyd Allport (1920), asked participants to write down as many associations as they could think of for words on a blank piece of paper. They performed for three one minute periods and they worked alone and also in the front of others. The results clearly showed that participants were able to produce more associations when working with others than by working alone. This is called social facilitation. In contrast, there is social inhibition, which also occurs if the participant’s performance decreases.
Long time after Allport’s research, Robert Zajonc (1965), discovered that the presence of an audience increases person’s drive and motivation and also arouse feeling of competition, which can affect the performance, depending on the difficulty of the task. Zajonc put forward his drive theory to explain this: First the arousal increases dominant respond, which is well known or learnt task. Secondly the response can either be correct or incorrect. Also if it is found that the people are skilled in the task, they will perform better than people less skilled. Lastly, he believed that the quality of person’s performance depends on if the task is easy or more complex. So for example, if you are asked to juggle in front of an audience and it is your first time, the audience may have a detrimental effect on you and so you may fail the task. In contrast, if you are well-rehearsed with juggling, you should do very well because arousal should lead to an increase in well-learnt behaviours. So Zajonc found by his researches also on animals that the presence of an audience enhances performance on easy tasks but impairs on difficult tasks.
Early researchers of Cottrell (1972) seemed to agree with Zajonc’s hypothesis. But later on he suggested that the presence of other people does not really produce arousal and the reason of different behaviour of people occurs simply because we are afraid of potential evaluation from our audience, which causes arousal. This theory is called Evaluation Apprehension Model. Cottrell (1972), for example, argued that the presence of others is a learned source of drive. According to Cottrell, it is not the mere presence of others that causes arousal but rather than the expectation that an audience will be judging one’s performance. Consequently, if subjects are asked to perform in front of a group of people who are blindfolded, they should show less arousal than when they perform in front of a group of clear-sighted evaluators. Studies using this approach have supported the distinction, finding more arousal in subjects (and the predicted effects on performance of simple and complex task) when an audience is expected to be capable of evaluation (Cottrell et al., 1968; Guerin, 1986). So people change their behaviours, just because they learnt that social approval or disapproval is based on evaluation by others. However, this is valid only if the audience is attentive and other people pay attention to participant’s performance, otherwise it does not have any effect.
Markus (1987), asked participants to undress and to dress them in their own clothes (an easy task) and unfamiliar clothes (a difficult task) in front of others, for the reason of testing the effect of an audience on task performance. The attempt was made in three types of conditions: alone, secondly with an inattentive audience and lastly with an attentive audience. He found out that in the case of the easy task, the effect happened only with attentive audience and participants were faster than when alone, which is clear proof of Evaluation Comprehension Module. However, in the case of the difficult task, the effect occurred not only with the attentive audience but also with the inattentive audience. So this result supports the Drive theory rather than the Evaluation Comprehension Module.
A more recent view we can find is under the name of ‘Distraction-conflict theory’. Baron (1986) supported this theory and proposed the new alternative view. He did not believe that the mere presence of others produces arousal and drive as Zajonc, but he fixated on conflict between attending to the task and on the other hand attending to others. So he apprehended the presence of other people as a distraction. This distraction can cause arousal and drive while people are trying to concentrate on the task. His study was supported by different forms of distraction such as movement, noise and lights.
This issue is very important by reason of cooperating and working in teams and has been studied for about a hundred years. I have proposed the development of this interesting issue and we can see that mere presence can affect the behaviour of a person. Although the arousal of drive is probably the strongest aspect occurred in the presence of others, but the presence of an audience can also became a distraction.
References:
Albgery, Chandler, Field, Jones, Messer, Moore, Sterling (2004), Complete Psychology, section 5 Social influence and group processes
Carlson, Martin, Buskist (2000), Psychology, chapter 16 by Michael A. Hogg and Dominic Abrahams, People in groups
Kay Deaux Lawrence S. Wrightsman, 5th ed., Social Psychology, Behaviour in groups
Jonathan L. Freedman, David O. Sears, J. Merrill Carlsmith, 4th ed., Social psychology, chapter 15 Group dynamics
