Desert Island

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• Desert Island

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Social Influence PSYB2
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Social Influence

• Efforts by one or more individuals to change the
  attitudes, beliefs, perceptions or behaviours of
  one or more others
• (Baron et al, 2006)
• Social influence can be a real or imagined
  pressure.

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Social Influence

• Social facilitation
• Conformity
• Obedience
• Defiance
• ETHICS AND METHODOLOGIES

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Social Facilitation

• where the performance at a task or a sport is
  affected by the mere presence of other people,
  and this performance can either be enhanced or
  made worse.

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Triplett (1898)

• Published one of the first experiments in social
  psychology. He observed how cyclists produced
  faster times when performing in pairs than when
  alone.

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Triplett (1898)

• In pairs read the study on the sheet provided and
  then answer as many questions as possible on the
  little A5 cards provided.
• AIM
• METHOD
• RESULTS
• CONCLUSION
• EVALUATION

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Task

• 1st
• Everyone write
• I LOVE PSYCHOLOGY
• 10 times

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Task

• 2nd
• Now the (someone
• comes to board)
• Write it backwards
• 10 times

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However

• Sometimes the presence of others can
• make performance worse.
• Allport (1924) did a number of experiments where
• participants would work alone in cubicles or
  alongside others.
• He found that when the task was simple, i.e.
  crossing
• out vowels in words the performance was best in
• front of others.
• However when the task was more complicated, i.e.
• solving complex problems, performance was better
• when working alone.

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Contradictory evidence.

• Dashiell (1930) found that the number of
  arithmetic problems performed by participants
  increased in the presence of others but so did
  the number of errors made.
• Schmitt et al (1986) found that participants
  typed their name faster in the presence of others
  but did best alone when asked to type their name
  backwards.
• The same results have been found in animal
  studies where simple mazes are worked out faster
  when in the presence of other animals whilst
  complex mazes are done better when alone. (Zajonc
  et al, 1969)

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Recap

• Write a quick summary for each below, then make
  up a mnemonic for all the researchers.
• Social Influence
• Social Facilitation
• Triplett
• Allport
• Dashiell
• Schmitt
• Zajonc

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Explanations for social facilitation

• Theories and studies to support

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Explanations for contradictory findings

1. Zajonc (1965) dominant response theory
2. Study to support (Michaels et al, 1982)
3. Zajoncs drive theory of social facilitation
4. Cottrells (1972) Evaluation apprehension theory
5. Study to support (Bartis et al, 1988)
6. Saunders (1983) Distraction conflict theory
7. Study to support (Saunders et al, 1978)

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Group work-15 mins

• Each group must produce some sort of A3 poster
  displaying your
• newly learned information in one of the following
  ways
• A mind map
• A flow diagram
• A storyboard
• A chart
• A key word plan
• Overlapping circles
• A graph
• Ranked bullet points
• Or anything else you choose

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Presentation

• Explain to class in a nutshell what the
  theory/study is about.
• and
• How it relates to social facilitation

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Homework for next lesson..

• I want you to produce a handout for your class
  mates
• using ICT based on what you have learned.
• This handout will be given to each member of the
  class.
• You must prepare some sort of quiz based on that
• Information which your classmates will complete
  i.e.
• crosswords, word searches, blockbusters, who
  wants to
• be a millionaire style Questions, true/false game
  etc
• etc
• Or you could produce at least 5 exam style
  questions
• based on that information

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Explanations for social facilitation

• Continued and evaluations

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Real life application SPORTS

• Playing golf is a skilled task. What would
  happen to your arousal levels if you had never
  played before and people were watching?
• What would your performance be like?
• This applies to any skilled sport, i.e. ice
  skating, high jump, etc

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Real life application - WORKPLACES

• Aiello and Kolb (1995) showed how highly skilled
  workers performed better when monitored, whereas
  unskilled performed worse.
• This again could be explained as others may cause
  distraction or enhance a persons fear of
  evaluation. Thus we must only do simple tasks
  when in the presence of others.
• MacCracken and Stadulis (1985) found that the
  presence of an audience had little effect on
  children (under 8yrs).why do you think this?

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Evaluation 1

• Researchers have challenged the idea that it is
  arousal alone which explains social facilitation.
  It is now thought that both arousal and
  cognitive processes such as attention are
  involved.

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Evaluation 2

• It may be that arousal is a result of the
  cognitive thoughts someone has after paying
  attention to the task and the audience. This may
  cause reduced or narrowed attention to the task.

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Evaluation 3

• Wicklund (1975) offered a different explanation
  centred in around self-awareness. He proposed
  that when in front of other people, the immediate
  response is to focus on oneself. This then
  causes the person to compare how he or she would
  perform ideally with how they actually perform.
  If there is a significant difference between the
  ideal and reality, the person tries to perform to
  their ideal. This will work on easy tasks but
  not on complex tasks which have not been learned.

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Evaluation 4

• Social psychologists have offered a number of
  different explanations for social facilitation,
  but after more than a hundred years of research,
  no one explanation has been agreed by all
  psychologists.

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Evaluation 5

• There are a number of criticisms of the research.
  First, audiences in experiments tend to be
  passive and simply observe someone performing the
  task. Real audiences are often noisy and judge
  behaviour, for example at Wimbledon centre court!
  Therefore many of the tasks performed are
  artificial and so lack ecological validity.
• Second, research has largely ignored the
  personality differences between individuals, for
  example Triplett (1898) found that 25 of
  participants showed worse than better performance
  when in front of an audience.