Social facilitation is an improvement in the performance of a task in the presence of others (audience, competitor, co-actor) compared to their performance when alone. Typically, this results in improved performance on simple or well-practiced tasks and decreased performance on complex or unfamiliar tasks.
Take-home Messages
- Social facilitation refers to the finding that people sometimes show an increased level of effort as a result of the real, imagined, or implied presence of others.
- The concept was first identified by Norman Triplett in 1898, when he noticed that cyclists’ racing times were faster when they competed against another rider than when they rode alone.
- Psychologist Floyd Allport coined the term social facilitation in his 1924 book Social Psychology, based on research he began publishing in 1920.
- There are two types of social facilitation: co-action effects and audience effects.
- Subsequent researchers found that performance improved as a result of the presence of others (social facilitation), whilst others found that it was impaired (social inhibition).
- Whether or not social facilitation occurs depends on the type of task: people tend to experience social facilitation when they are familiar with a task or for well-learned skills. However, social inhibition (decreased performance in the presence of others) occurs for difficult or novel tasks.
Examples
Co-action Effects
A co-action effect refers to a phenomenon whereby increased task performance comes about by the mere presence of others doing the same task. An example would be running a 100 meter sprint against someone.
The mere presence of others can enhance performance on simple or well-learned tasks but may hinder performance on complex or unfamiliar tasks. Co-action effects emphasize how parallel activity, rather than direct competition or cooperation, can impact individual behavior.
Perhaps the first social psychology laboratory experiment was Norman Triplett’s (1898) study of competitive cycling, widely regarded as the founding demonstration of social facilitation.
Aim: Triplett had noticed that competitive cyclists posted faster times when racing against another rider than when riding alone against the clock. He wanted to test this pacemaking effect under controlled laboratory conditions.
Method: Triplett had children aged roughly 8 to 17 wind a fixed length of fishing line onto a reel. A specially built machine let two children work side by side. Each child completed trials alone and paired with another child working at the same time.
Results: Of the 40 children whose results Triplett analyzed closely, roughly half reeled in the line distinctly faster when paired with another child. A smaller group went slower, which Triplett put down to over-excitement, and the rest showed little change.
Conclusion: Triplett concluded that “the bodily presence of another contestant participating simultaneously in the race serves to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available” (1898, p. 533). His method, isolating co-actor presence as the only variable that changed, became the template for later social facilitation research.
Later reviewers have questioned whether Triplett’s results were statistically reliable, given his small sample and lack of control over motivation. Even so, its real legacy is methodological. It was the first study to isolate the presence of a co-actor as an independent variable affecting performance.
You may notice the co-action effect if you concentrate better in a library than at home, even though both places are quiet.
Other co-action studies point the same way. Chen (1937) found that worker ants dig more than three times as much sand per ant when working (non-co-operatively) alongside other ants than when working alone.
Platt, Yaksh, and Darby (1967) found that animals will eat more of their food if there are others of their species present.
Audience Effects
Social facilitation occurs not only in the presence of a co-actor but also in the presence of a passive spectator/audience. This is known as the audience effect.
Dashiell (1935) found that the presence of an audience facilitated subjects’ multiplication performance by increasing the number of simple multiplications completed.
An audience effect is a type of social facilitation in which an individual’s performance is influenced by the presence of others, or an audience. This presence causes the individual’s dominant response to occur.
Travis (1925) found that well-trained subjects were better at a psychomotor task (pursuit rotor) in front of spectators.
However, Pessin (1933) found the opposite audience effect. Subjects needed fewer trials to learn a list of nonsense words when working alone than when in front of an audience.
It seems, then, that the extent of social facilitation or inhibition depends upon the nature of the interaction between the task and the performer.
Social Loafing
However, there are instances where the presence of others has the opposite effect. Sometimes we don’t work as hard in the presence of others as we do when alone, especially if our behavior is not under direct surveillance. This phenomenon is known as social loafing.
Social loafing is a psychological phenomenon wherein individuals exert less effort when working on a collective task with others compared to when they work individually.
Essentially, as the group size increases, some individuals tend to “hide in the crowd” and let others carry the workload.
In larger groups, responsibility for the task is spread across many members. This diffusion can make individuals feel less personally accountable.
Theories of Social Facilitation
Underlying mechanisms through which the basic phenomenon of social facilitation operates, include:
Cognitive Factors (Distraction Conflict and Attention)
Distraction-conflict theory (Baron, 1986) offers a different explanation. It argues that the conflict between attending to a person and attending to a task, not mere presence, is what affects performance.
This attentional conflict raises drive, which speeds up performance on simple, well-learned tasks. On complex or unfamiliar tasks, the same conflict impairs performance, because attention is split between the task and the other person (Baron, 1986).
Affective Factors (Anxiety of Being Evaluated)
According to Cottrell (1968), mere presence is not what drives social facilitation. What matters is the performer’s apprehension about being evaluated by others.
We know that approval and disapproval often depend on others’ evaluations. The presence of others therefore triggers an acquired arousal drive based on evaluation anxiety.
We are aroused by audiences because we have learned that they evaluate our performance; they are not merely passive spectators, we believe.
Such performance evaluation apprehension enhances drive and arousal.
Physiological Factors (Drive and Arousal)
According to Zajonc’s drive theory of social facilitation, behavior that is instinctive or well-learned is improved, whereas behavior that is novel or complex is impaired.
Zajonc’s (1965) fundamental claim is that “an audience impairs the acquisition of new responses and facilitates the emission of well-learned responses” (p. 274).
His crucial theoretical contribution was that the presence of others enhances the emission of dominant responses.
Zajonc’s explanation draws on Clark Hull’s theory of motivation. Hull argued that a high level of arousal, or drive, strengthens whichever response is most dominant, or habitual, in a given situation.
The presence of others adds to a person’s arousal. On a difficult or unfamiliar task, that extra arousal strengthens the wrong, dominant response, producing the kind of performance-impairing stress seen under pressure.
The extra arousal from the presence of others can push us past our optimum level of arousal. This makes the dominant response something we can do easily, not something new or demanding. The Yerkes-Dodson theory of optimal arousal supports this idea.
A dominant response is simply the response that is most likely to occur in the presence of the given array of stimuli.
If a task is easy, the dominant response is usually the correct one. The audience or co-actor helps bring out this response, which improves performance.
If a task is difficult, the dominant response is usually the incorrect one. The audience or co-actor still brings out this response, but now performance suffers because the response is wrong.
Implications
Social facilitation has several implications for understanding behavior in group settings and structuring group tasks. Here are some of the key implications:
- Performance Enhancement or Deterioration: The mere presence of others can improve or hinder performance, depending on task complexity. Simple tasks usually see a boost; complex tasks may decline.
- Training and Skill Development: Practicing a new skill alone first is often best. Once the skill feels familiar, practicing in front of others can help solidify it.
- Workplace Productivity: Social facilitation can guide office design. Open-plan offices suit routine tasks well but may hurt tasks that need deep concentration or problem-solving.
- Educational Settings: Social facilitation affects students differently. Some perform better on tests around others, while some find the same setting distracting.
- Sports and Athletics: Athletes often perform better with an audience, leveraging the arousal from the presence of spectators to enhance their performance.
Critical Evaluation
Drive theory has held up well on its central prediction: presence helps performance on simple, well-learned tasks and hurts performance on complex ones. Two questions remain important. How strong is this effect in the research record? And what has more recent research added to Zajonc’s original account?
How Strong Is the Evidence?
The strongest test of drive theory comes from Bond and Titus (1983). They statistically combined 241 studies and roughly 24,000 participants published between 1898 and 1980. They calculated effect sizes separately for speed and accuracy, on both simple and complex tasks, across audience and co-action studies.
The presence of others reliably sped up simple tasks and reliably slowed complex ones, confirming Zajonc’s prediction. But the effect was small: mere presence explained only 0.3 to 3% of the variance in performance.
Physiological arousal measures did not reliably track the presence manipulation across studies, a gap that has troubled drive theory ever since.
Zajonc and Sales (1966) confirmed the mechanism directly in humans. Participants pre-trained on certain responses showed more of those dominant responses, and fewer alternatives, when an audience was present.
The Cockroach Evidence
Zajonc, Heingartner, and Herman (1969) designed the study to strip away every cognitive explanation of social facilitation, using cockroaches (Blatta orientalis) as subjects. A cockroach cannot form self-presentation concerns or anticipate being judged, so if presence altered its performance, the effect could only be driven by non-specific arousal, not evaluation.
Cockroaches ran individually through a Plexiglas runway apparatus fitted as either a simple straight runway leading to a dark goal box, where the escape response was directly correct, or a complex maze with a right-angle turn, where the dominant escape response first had to be inhibited.
A bright overhead light supplied the escape motivation. Each animal ran alone, with an audience of other cockroaches watching from transparent side boxes, or paired with a co-acting cockroach in a matching runway.
In the simple runway, audience and co-action conditions produced faster times than running alone; in the maze, both conditions produced slower times. This is the same interaction found repeatedly in human studies: presence speeds simple, well-learned responses and slows complex ones.
Because cockroaches cannot plausibly feel evaluation anxiety, the pattern is difficult to explain without some form of drive-based mechanism.
Contemporary Research
The most influential recent synthesis is Belletier, Normand, and Huguet (2019), published in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Rather than pick a winner among drive, evaluation-apprehension, and distraction-conflict accounts, the review maps each onto distinct brain systems.
Motivational accounts, like drive and evaluation apprehension, engage reward and threat circuits such as the ventral striatum and amygdala. Cognitive accounts, like distraction-conflict, engage attention circuits that narrow focus, helping simple tasks and hurting complex ones.
The review’s key claim is that arousal and attention are separable pathways to the same task-complexity effect.
Together, these findings support Zajonc’s central insight while adding an important caveat. The task-complexity effect is genuine and now traced to specific brain systems, but its everyday impact on performance is usually modest, not dramatic.
References
Baron, R. S. (1986). Distraction-conflict theory: Progress and problems. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19, pp. 1-40). Academic Press.
Belletier, C., Normand, A., & Huguet, P. (2019). Social-facilitation-and-impairment effects: From motivation to cognition and the social brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28(3), 260-265.
Bond, C. F., Jr., & Titus, L. J. (1983). Social facilitation: A meta-analysis of 241 studies. Psychological Bulletin, 94(2), 265-292.
Chen, S. C. (1937). The leaders and followers among the ants in nest-building. Physiological Zoology, 10(4), 437-455.
Cottrell, N. B., Wack, D. L., Sekerak, G. J., & Rittle, R. H. (1968). Social facilitation of dominant responses by the presence of an audience and the mere presence of others. Journal of personality and social psychology, 9(3), 245.
Dashiell, J. F. (1935). Experimental studies of the influence of social situations on the behavior of individual human adults.
Pessin, J. (1933). The comparative effects of social and mechanical stimulation on memorizing. The American Journal of Psychology, 45(2), 263-270.
Platt, J. J., Yaksh, T., & Darby, C. L. (1967). Social facilitation of eating behavior in armadillos. Psychological Reports, 20(3c), 1136-1136.
Travis, L. E. (1925). The effect of a small audience upon eye-hand coordination. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 20(2), 142.
Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition. The American journal of psychology, 9(4), 507-533.
Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149(3681), 269-274.
Zajonc, R. B., Heingartner, A., & Herman, E. M. (1969). Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13(2), 83-92.
Zajonc, R. B., & Sales, S. M. (1966). Social facilitation of dominant and subordinate responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2 (2), 160-168.
