Social Facilitation: What It Is, How It Influences Us, And Theories That Explain It
It happens to many athletes that they have better records competing or practicing in company than doing it alone. Human beings are social animals and the presence of others influences our behavior, sometimes making our performance better.
Whether because we try harder, because we are more motivated, or simply to beat other people, the presence of other individuals makes our performance grow.
This phenomenon is what is known as social facilitation Let’s see what it consists of and what other phenomena influence it.
Social facilitation is the phenomenon that It occurs when, being surrounded or close to other people, we perform better on a given task The mere presence of others makes you perform better doing a simple activity, either because you compete against them or because you feel motivated and pressured to do better. This phenomenon has been studied for more than a century, being demonstrated in multiple studies and research.
In 1898, psychologist Norman Triplett began studying social facilitation, although it would not be until several decades later that the phenomenon would be called that. Triplett was a cycling fanatic and It gave him the impression that those cyclists who accompanied each other had better performance To verify this, he compared the scores of cyclists from the American Cycling League and, indeed, observed that these improved when the athletes accompanied or competed with each other. They ran up to 5 seconds faster in company than when alone.
Triplett wanted to know if this was an exclusive phenomenon in athletes or if it also occurred in other areas, so he decided to see it with children. The psychologist asked some kids to wind the thread on a spool as fast as they could, verifying that indeed the curious phenomenon that he had observed with cyclists also occurred here. When they were accompanied by other children, the boys completed the task faster.
It was in 1920 when Floyd Henry Allport (Gordon Allport’s brother) coined the term social facilitation to describe this phenomenon. In one of his investigations, Allport studied how effectively a given task was performed in a group of participants. The task he gave them was to write as many words as possible that were related to a concept. When the experimental subjects were accompanied, they managed to produce many more words than when they were asked the same task while alone
Phenomena involved in social facilitation
There are several phenomena that can occur in a case of social facilitation. Among the most notable we have the following three:
1. Duress effect
The coercion effect implies that, when we are doing a task with other people who are also doing it, our performance is higher because we try harder In this context, our goal is to demonstrate that we are as valid or more valid than those around us. Factors such as competitiveness and group pressure influence coercion.
This phenomenon has not only been observed in humans. In a fairly old study carried out by the psychologist SC Chen (1937) he observed how worker ants, when digging in the sand, worked up to three times better in company than those who did so alone.
2. Audience effect
The audience effect implies that, when we feel observed by other people while we are executing a task in which we have practice and mastery, our performance improves. This is due to the motivation of try to please others, demonstrate our worth and let them know how competent we are at a task
For example, let’s imagine an expert pianist who has to play a complicated piece in front of an entire theater. In his solitude, he has practiced the piece over and over again, reaching the point that he feels confident enough and feels, too, that he has mastered it. He arrives on the day of the concert and not only plays the piece without any errors, but he manages to do it better than when he practiced alone.
Theories that explain the phenomenon of facilitation
Apart from the theory of social facilitation suggested by both Allport and other authors, we have other theories and hypotheses that would explain the phenomenon. Among them we highlight the following three.
1. Evaluation Apprehension Hypothesis
This hypothesis maintains that People, in reality, feel pressured by the fear of being evaluated by others Since we don’t want to look bad in front of other people, we try to give the best of ourselves.
2. Warning hypothesis
According to this hypothesis, When we feel observed we enter a state of alert which drives us to be more competent
3. Self-presentation theory
Part of our self-concept is based on the image we believe we show to others. Related to social facilitation, the idea is that We strive to always do our best when we are in front of other people in order to make them like us Consequently, the social reinforcement we receive for having done things well will make us have a more positive view of ourselves.
You may be interested: “The 10 main psychological theories”
Social facilitation and inhibition
The presence of other people does not always make us perform better. In the same way that social facilitation implies that we do things better when other people are around, we found an effect that is just the opposite: social inhibition. As its name suggests, It consists of us doing a certain task worse, usually in which we have little skill, being in the company of others than alone
In 1933, J. Pessin carried out a study in which he intuited the phenomenon of social inhibition. He asked a group of participants to memorize a list of nonsense syllables in front of an audience. The task was extremely complicated in itself, something that was even more difficult being in the presence of such an intimidating audience. Participants showed worse performance being observed than being alone.
Later, in 1956, Robert Zajonc further studied this negative effect of being observed by others, something that apparently contradicted Floyd Allport’s social facilitation theory. Zajonc observed how people performed simple and complex tasks in the presence of others and analyzed the results. According to Zajonc’s perspective, When we are working in a group, we emit what he called “dominant response.” This would be that, when stimulated by others by their mere presence, the probability of an individual being more efficient increases, because it is what is expected of them.
Zajonc came to the conclusion that, when the tasks to be performed are simple, either because they are not very complex or because we have a lot of experience with them, the presence of other people makes us perform better than being alone. Instead, When the tasks were more difficult or there was no experience with them, having an audience watching hurt their performance
This inhibited effect was incorporated into the theory of social facilitation by Zajonc in a new generalized hypothesis in which the two effects were taken into account. Current theory argues that, when we have to do something that we do master when in the presence of other people, we will do it better than when alone. On the other hand, if what we have to do is something in which we are not very crafty or we perceive that we will do it badly, being in the presence of others we will do it even worse because we will feel that they are going to judge us very negatively.
