The theory of social facilitation holds that people perform
better when they are in the presence of others, such as a coworker or an
audience. This phenomenon is caused in part by the fact that if another person
is evaluating them, they may experience anxiety or fear, which can increase
their motivation.
What Is Social Facilitation?
Social facilitation is a psychological theory that suggests
people are more productive or perform better when they are in the company of
others. This includes both the physical presence of others in the workplace and
the implied, imagined, or digital presence of others. Social facilitation is
also classified as coaction effects (when two people working on the same task
collaborate as co-actors) and audience effects (when a person completes a task
in front of others or an audience).
The inverse of social facilitation is social loafing, which
occurs when the presence of an audience or another person causes a person to
lose focus or makes a task more difficult.
Origin of the Term Social Facilitation
In 1898, Norman Triplett investigated the theory of social
facilitation and discovered that cyclists performed better when competing
against others rather than simply trying to beat their own time. Later,
Triplett expanded on his social facilitation research by conducting an
experiment in which he had children perform a simple task with a fishing reel.
He discovered that when working with others, half of the children worked
faster, while the other half worked slower or equally. He called this effect
drive theory after publishing the findings, titled "The Dynamogenic
Factors in Pacemaking and Competition," in The American Journal of
Psychology.
Floyd Allport, a psychologist, coined the term
"stress-induced performance enhancement of social interactions activation
theory" in 1920. In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 1966,
social psychologists Robert Zajonc and Stephen Sales proposed their dominant
response theory. They discovered that social facilitation improved performance
for simple tasks that people are familiar with but degraded performance for
complex tasks.
Contributing Factors to Social Facilitation
There are three major factors that contribute to social
facilitation:
1. Affective: The presence of another person causes anxiety
and apprehension as they perform the task. These influencing factors stimulate
motivation to perform better and receive a better evaluation.
2. Cognitive: The mere presence of others can aid in task
focus and prevent distraction. Social facilitation can improve focus on task
performance for some people while being a distraction for others.
3. Physiological: Working with an audience or a partner can
raise your arousal level and motivate you to perform well. Physical arousal
from social facilitation can make difficult tasks appear easy.
Approaches to Social Facilitation
Many psychologists have continued to investigate the effects
of social facilitation. Many theories and approaches investigate the effects of
social facilitation, including:
Evaluation apprehension hypothesis: This theory, also
known as the evaluation approach, contends that it is the evaluation or
judgment of our peers in social situations that leads to an improvement in
performance.
Distraction-conflict theory: According to Robert
Baron's distraction-conflict theory, in social situations, a person must choose
between paying attention to a person and paying attention to a task. This
conflict actually improves individual task performance.
Self-presentation approach: According to the self-presentation
approach, people become concerned with how they appear in front of an audience;
they want to appear competent. In 1983, Charles Bond and Linda Titus published
"Social Facilitation: A Meta-analysis of 241 Studies" in the
Psychological Bulletin.
Yerkes“Dodson law: According to the Yerkes-Dodson law,
a person's performance on a task while in the presence of others depends on
whether the task is simple or complex.
If you wish to contribute to our blog, please email us on morhadotsan@gmail.com.
