Social facilitation

Social facilitation, or the audience effect, is the tendency for people to perform differently when in the presence of others than when alone. Compared to their performance when alone, when in the presence of others, they tend to perform better on simple or well-rehearsed tasks and worse on complex or new ones. The Yerkes-Dodson law, when applied to social facilitation, states that "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."

Social facilitation has occasionally been attributed to the fact that certain people are more susceptible to social influence, with the argument that personality factors can make these people more aware of evaluation.

The audience effect is an attempt at psychologically explaining why the presence of an audience leads to people's performing tasks better in some cases and worse in others. This idea was further explored when some studies showed that the presence of a passive audience facilitated the better performance of a simple task, while other studies showed that the presence of a passive audience inhibited the performance of a more difficult task or one that was not well practiced, possibly due to psychological pressure or stress. (See Yerkes–Dodson law.)

Social facilitation can be defined as a tendency for individuals to perform differently when in the mere presence of others. Specifically, individuals perform better on simpler or well-rehearsed tasks and perform worse on complex or new ones. In relation to this, there are three main empirical relationships which are the activation, evaluation, and attention theories. The activation theory describes how we are physiologically aroused and how that affects our functioning. The evaluation theory relates to the systematic assessment of the worth or merit of some object. The attention theory takes into account possession in the mind including focalization and concentration of consciousness.

In 1897, Triplett studied the effect on performance of having an audience. Triplett's experiment had a simple design; a cyclist's performance when alone was compared with a cyclist's performance when racing against another cyclist. He found that the cyclist was slowest when he was only racing the clock and not another cyclist. He attributed these results to a competitive instinct which releases energy that was not available when peddling alone. Triplett's study started off a revolution of studies attempting to examine the theory that people's performance is influenced by the presence of others. The, in 1898, while studying the competitive nature of children, he found that children were much faster at completing their given activity (winding string) while they were competing, which caused him to wonder whether or not simply having another individual there would have the same effect. To determine this, Triplett studied the race time of cyclists and found that cyclists had faster race times when in the presence of other cyclists. He theorized that the faster times were because the presence of others made individuals more competitive, and further research led Triplett to theorize that the presence of others increases individuals' performances in other noncompetitive situations as well.

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