SOCIAL FACILITATION - WHY WE AROUSED

Social facilitation is the tendency for people to be aroused into better performance on simple tasks  when under the eye of others, rather than while they are alone, or when they are working alongside other people. Complex tasks (or tasks at which people are not skilled), however, are often performed in an inferior manner in such situations. This effect has been demonstrated in a variety of species. In humans, it is strongest among those who are most concerned about the opinions of others, and when the individual is being watched by someone he or she does not know, or cannot see well. 

Original Meaning

The tendency of people to perform simple or well-learned tasks better when others are present.

Current Meaning

The strengthening of dominant (prevalent, likely) responses due to the presence of others.

WHY ARE WE AROUSED IN THE PRESENCE OF OTHERS?

To this point we have seen that what you do well, you will be energized to do best in front of others (unless you become hyper aroused and self-conscious). What you find difficult may seem impossible in the same circumstances. What is it about other people that causes arousal? Is it their mere presence? There is evidence to support three possible factors, each of which may play a role.

  Evaluation Apprehension

  Driven by Distraction

  Mere Presence

Evaluation Apprehension: It concern for how others are evaluating us. Nickolas Cottrell surmised that observers make us apprehensive because we wonder how they are evaluating us. To test whether evaluation apprehension exists, Cottrell and his associates (1968) repeated Zajonc and Sales's nonsense-syllable study at Kent State University and added a third condition. In this "mere presence" condition they blindfolded observers, supposedly in preparation for a perception experiment. In contrast to the effect of the watching audience, the mere presence of these blindfolded people did not boost well-practiced responses. Other experiments confirmed Cottrell's conclusion: The enhancement of dominant responses is strongest when people think they are being evaluated. In one experiment, joggers on a University of California at Santa Barbara jogging path sped up as they came upon a woman seated on the grass—if she was facing them rather than sitting with her back turned. (Worringham & Messick, 1983)

Evaluation apprehension also helps explain:

 Why people perform best when their coactor  is slightly superior. 

 Why arousal may lessen when a high-status group is diluted by the addition of people whose opinions we don't much care about. 

 Why people who worry most about others' evaluations are the ones most affected by their presence. 

 Why social-facilitation effects are greatest when the others are unfamiliar and hard to keep an eye on.

The self-consciousness we feel when being evaluated can also interfere with behaviors that we perform best automatically—without thinking about how we're doing them. If self-conscious basketball players analyze their body movements while shooting critical free throws, they are more likely to miss.

Driven by Distraction: Glenn Sanders, Robert Baron, and Danny Moore carry evaluation apprehension a step farther. They theorize that when people wonder how coactors are doing or how an audience is reacting, they get distracted.  This conflict between paying attention to others and paying attention to the task overloads the cognitive system, causing arousal. Evidence that people are indeed "driven by distraction" comes from experiments that produce social facilitation not just by the presence of another person but even by a nonhuman distraction, such as bursts of light (Sanders, 1981a, 1981b).

Mere Presence: Zajonc, however, believes that the mere presence of others produces some arousal even without evaluation apprehension or conflict. For example, people's color preferences are stronger when they make judgments with others present (Goldman, 1967). On such a task, there is no "good" or "right" answer for others to evaluate and thus no reason to be concerned with their reactions.

That response facilitation effects also occur with animals, which probably are not consciously worrying about how other animals are evaluating them, hints at an innate social arousal mechanism common to much of the zoological world. I think that Tawana, our jogger, would agree. Most joggers feel energized when jogging with someone else, even one who neither competes nor evaluates.

Application is properly the last research phase. In their study of social facilitation, researchers have yet to work much on this. That gives us the opportunity to speculate on what some applications might be. For example, many new office buildings are replacing private offices with large, open areas divided by low partitions. Might the resulting awareness of others' presence help energize the performance of well-learned tasks but disrupt creative thinking on complex tasks? Can you think of other possible applications?

CONCLUSION

Social psychology’s most elementary issue concerns the mere presence of others. Some early experiments on this question found that performance improved wit observers or co-actors present. Others found that the presence of others can hurt performance. Robert Zajonc reconciled these findings by applying a well-known principle from experimental psychology: Arousal facilitates dominant responses. Because the presence of others is arousing, the presence of observers or co-actors boosts performance on easy tasks (for which the correct response is dominant) and hinders performance on difficult tasks (for which incorrect responses are dominant). But why are we aroused by others presence? Experiments suggest that the arousal stems partly from evaluation apprehension and partly from distraction a conflict between paying attention to others and concentrating on the task. Other experiments, including some with animals, suggest that the presence fo others can be arousing even when we are not evaluated or distracted.