Download Social Facilitation www.AssignmentPoint.com Social facilitation is

Social Facilitation
www.AssignmentPoint.com
www.AssignmentPoint.com
Social facilitation is the tendency for people to do better on simple tasks when
in the presence of other people. This implies that, whenever people are being
watched by others, they will do well on things that they are already good at
doing. The idea that social evaluation has an impact on performance sparked
interest in the psychological reasons behind this phenomenon, leading to further
research surrounding the social facilitation theory and its implications.
This theory suggests that the mere or imagined presence of people in social
situations creates an atmosphere of evaluation. The Yerkes-Dodson law of
social facilitation states that, in this atmosphere, "the mere presence of other
people will enhance the performance in speed and accuracy of well-practiced
tasks, but will degrade the performance of less familiar tasks." For example, a
star soccer player may perform better in his game when more people are
watching him perform. However, if a person is asked to fix a car's engine during
a road race but is not a mechanic, he will not perform as well if he is aware of
the presence of others than he would in a situation when he feels less evaluated
or pressured, like just trying to fix a car in his garage.
Social facilitation has occasionally been attributed to the fact that certain people
are more susceptible to social influence, with the argument that person factors
can make these people more aware of evaluation. These personality
characteristics may cause some people to be more greatly affected by the
presence of their observers.
The role of social facilitation is important to consider in social situations,
because it implies that people's performance does not rely solely on their
www.AssignmentPoint.com
abilities, but is also impacted by the internal awareness of being evaluated.
Performance can be greatly affected by situation factors, thus making it possible
to entirely alter the outcome of a situation. This can be very important when
considering how anyone will perform under evaluation and how to potentially
prepare for those situations. For example, if a professional basketball player
practices shooting free throws with fake audience noise in the background, he
will not feel as if he is under as much evaluation in a real game situation. This is
because the noise-pressured free throws will start to become a simple task rather
than a complex task as he practices more. Although he will know that the fake
noise is not evaluating him the same way that real crowd would, he is adjusting
his awareness of the potential evaluation, and is thus trying to combat any harm
that social facilitation could bring to his shooting abilities.
Major theoretical approaches
Norman Triplett pioneered research on social facilitation in 1898. Triplett found
that cyclists had faster race times when in the presence of other cyclists. Triplett
theorized that the faster times were because the presence of others made
individuals more competitive. Further research led Triplett to theorize that the
presence of others increases individuals' performances in other situations as
well. Floyd Allport coined the term social facilitation in 1924. Allport,
commonly considered the founder of social psychology, conducted studies in
which participants sat either alone or with other participants and did a variety of
tasks such as word association tasks and multiplication assessments. He found
that people performed better when in a group setting than when alone for the
majority of tasks. At this time, social facilitation simply meant an "increase in
response merely from the sight or sound of others making the same movement."
www.AssignmentPoint.com
Activation theory
In 1965, Robert Zajonc proposed the first activation theory for social
facilitation. Zajonc's generalized drive hypothesis was the first theory that
addressed why the presence of others increased performance sometimes yet
decreased it at other times. Zajonc argued that the presence of others serves as a
source of arousal, and heightened arousal increases the likelihood of an
organism to do well-learned or habitual responses. For this reason, arousal
improves performance on simple (well-learned) tasks, but impairs performance
on complex (not well-learned) tasks. Zajonc's reasoning was based on YerkesDodson's law, which holds that performance works like an inverse "U" function.
This means that an individual's optimal drive is higher for simpler, or wellpracticed tasks, and that the same individual's optimal drive is lower for more
complex, or less-practiced tasks. The presence of other people further arouses us
and increases our drive level, and so an individual's performance will be
enhanced if a task is simple (because of the high levels of energy) but
diminished if the task is complex. Zajonc tested his theories by having people
complete word association tasks alone and again in the presence of others.
Zajonc also learned that social facilitation was not a phenomenon restricted to
human beings, since he found that cockroaches ran through easy mazes faster
when other cockroaches were watching them or also running through the maze
(co-actors), compared to when the cockroaches ran through the maze alone. In
contrast, cockroaches ran slower through hard mazes when there were other
cockroaches present or running through it than when they ran through it alone.
Some researchers have found that social facilitation effects occur when the
organism is expecting negative feedback, but some experiments have shown
that expecting positive feedback can effect social facilitation as well.
www.AssignmentPoint.com
Other activation theories include the alertness hypothesis, the monitoring
hypothesis, and the challenge and threat hypothesis. The alertness hypothesis
says that people are uncertain of how observers will act while in the presence of
others, so they become more alert (because the performer will be uncertain
about how the observers will act in the situation), and it is this heightened
alertness which causes them to perform better on tasks.
The monitoring hypothesis posits that social facilitation effects do not occur
when the performer is familiar with the observers or are familiar with the
situation, because the performer will know how the observer will act or what the
situational factors will do, so the performer's arousal will not increase. So, if the
person is unfamiliar with the observers or the situation, he/she will experience
uncertainty and arousal will increase, but not if he/she is familiar with them.
The challenge and threat hypothesis states that people perform worse on
complex tasks and better on simple tasks when in the presence of others because
of the type of cardio-vascular response to the task. When performing a simple
task in the presence of others, people show a normal cardio-vascular response.
However, when performing a complex task in the presence of others, the cardiovascular response is similar to that of a person in a threatening position. The
normal cardio-vascular response serves to improve performance, but the threatlike cardiovascular response serves to impede performance.
Evaluation approach
www.AssignmentPoint.com
In 1968, Henchy and Glass proposed the first evaluation approach to social
facilitation. Their evaluation apprehension hypothesis says that it is not the mere
presence of others that increases individual activation/arousal, but rather the fear
of being evaluated. An extension of the evaluation apprehension hypothesis is
the learned drive hypothesis, which states that activation increases, not because
of fear of evaluation, but from just the act of being evaluated, or associating
evaluation with a certain activity.
Attention theories
In the 1980s, explanations shifted from activation theories to attention theories.
Attention theories that explain social facilitation include the distraction-conflict
hypothesis, the overload hypothesis, the feedback-loop model, and the capacity
model.
In his distraction-conflict hypothesis, Robert Barron proposed that the level of
performance on a task is predicted by the amount of distractions in the
environment surrounding the task. The hypothesis states that distraction leads to
arousal, so the presence of others always impedes performance on difficult
tasks, but the number of distractions in the environment either improves or
impedes the performance on simple tasks.
The overload hypothesis works according to the distraction-conflict hypothesis,
saying that distracters do not lead to increased arousal, but rather to cognitive
overload (when an individual is bombarded with excessive information in their
working memory),[5] and while in cognitive overload, individuals will do worse
on complex tasks and better on more simple tasks.[1] Performance increases on
www.AssignmentPoint.com
simple tasks because the performers focus their attention on the new stimuli,
instead of the irrelevant stimuli that is characteristic of simple tasks.
Performance decreases on complex tasks because the performers focus on the
distracters, but also need to focus on the relevant stimuli that are characteristic
of complex tasks, and they cannot handle all of the information they are being
presented with.
The feedback-loop model postulates that when people feel they are being
observed, they focus attention on themselves. While in this state, individuals
become aware of the differences between their actual behavior and anticipated
behavior. So, by Feedback-Loop Model, people do better in the presence of
others because of this increased awareness about their behavior.
The capacity model of social facilitation focuses on the role of types of
information processing on performance in front of an audience, rather than the
performance on different type of tasks (simple or complex) in front of an
audience. The capacity model suggests that for tasks that require automatic
information processing, the presence of others does not cause problems because
the short-term memory is not required for automatic information processing, so
performance quality increases. However, for tasks that require controlled
information processing, the presence of others does impede the level of
performance because the short-term memory is necessary to both focus attention
on the audience, as well as the task at hand.
www.AssignmentPoint.com