SOCIAL FACILITATION

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SOCIAL FACILITATION
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• The Mere Presence of Others
• Social facilitation The tendency for people
  to perform simple or well-learned tasks better
  when others are present. The strengthening of
  dominant (prevalent) responses in the presence of
  others. D. Myers
• Norman Triplett (1898) found that cyclists times
  were faster when racing with others than when
  they were racing alone. So he conducted an
  experiment in which he asked children to wind
  fishing reels as quickly as they could. He found
  that children who worked alongside a competitor,
  wound the reel faster.
• The mere presence of others increases the speed
  that people do simple multiplication problems,
  cross out certain letters, and it improves the
  accuracy of simple motor tasks.

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However, some studies show that the presence of
others hurts performance on some tasks. For
instance, the presence of others diminishes
learning nonsense syllables, completing mazes,
and solving complex multiplication problems.
Why?
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Robert Zajonc believed that the well-established
effects of arousal were behind these
contradicting results. Effects of
arousal Arousal improves performance on easy
tasks where the dominant response (the most
likely response) is the correct response.
Arousal decreases performance on complex tasks
where the dominant response is not the correct
response. Zajonc found that the presence of
others leads to arousal and therefore elicit the
previous effects. Hence, social arousal
increases dominant responses, so it increases
performance on easy tasks and decreases it on
complex tasks (subordinate responses).
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Yerkes Dodson Law
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Zajonc and Sales experiment Zajonc and Sales
had people say nonsense words between 1 to 16
times each. They then informed the people that
the words would appear on a screen one at a time.
The people had to guess which word had appeared
on the screen each time. People presented with
only black lines for a hundredth of a second,
guessed the words they had said most frequently
(16 times) at the beginning of the experiment.
This was because these words became the dominant
responses. If two other people were present the
participant was more likely to guess the dominant
words.
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Zajonc, Heingartner, and Hermans Cockroach
Experiment - Zajonc, Heingartner, and Herman
observed girl cockroaches running mazes and
runways. If there were other cockroaches present
(as co-actors or as an audience), the
cockroaches maze performance plummetted, while
their runway performance soared.
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• Crowding
• The effect of other people increases with their
  number.
• Large enough audiences can create extreme
  arousal and self-conciousness, leading to more
  perspiration, faster breathing, tensing of the
  muscles, increased blood pressure, and a faster
  heart rate.
• These stress inducing situations can impair even
  the most dominant, automatic behaviors, such as
  speech. Indeed, stutterers stutter more in the
  presence of a larger audience.
• Gary Evans found that classrooms that placed
  the same amount of people closer together led to
  arousal in the form of higher pulse rates and
  blood pressure. Their performance on simple tasks
  did not suffer. However, their performance on
  difficult tasks did suffer.

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• Why does the mere presence of others lead to
  arousal?
• 1.) Evaluation apprehension Concern for how
  others are evaluation us, which can, of course,
  interfere with dominant response.
• Experiments have shown that dominant responses
  are strongest when people believe they are being
  evaluated
• People will perform best if their audience is
  slightly superior.
• Arousal will decrease if we are being watched by
  people whose opinions dont matter to us.
• People who worry most about being evaluated,
  show the most arousal in the presence of others.
• 2.) Distraction
• When people think about how their competitor is
  doing or how their audience is reacting, they get
  distracted. They divide their attention between
  the audience and the task, which overworks the
  mind, causing arousal.
• 3.) Mere Presence
• Zajonc believed that others presence is simply
  invigorating. Social facilitation even occurs in
  animals, which suggests an innate social arousal
  mechanism.