Social facilitation: what it is, how it influences us, and theories that explain it

It happens to many athletes that they have better marks competing or practicing in company than doing it alone. The human being is a social animal and the presence of others influences our behavior, sometimes making our performance better.

Whether it's because we work harder, because we're more motivated, or simply to beat other people, the presence of other individuals increases our performance.

This phenomenon is known as social facilitation.. Let's see what it consists of and what other phenomena influence it.

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What is social facilitation?

Social facilitation is the phenomenon that occurs when, being surrounded or close to other people, we have a better performance in a certain task. The mere presence of others makes you perform better in 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 investigations.

In 1898 the psychologist Norman Triplett was the one who began to study social facilitation, although it would not be until several decades later that the phenomenon would be called that. Triplett was a fan of cycling and he gave her the impression that those cyclists who accompanied each other had a better performance. To prove this, he compared the scores of cyclists in the American Cycling League and, Indeed, he observed that these improved when athletes accompanied or competed with each other. they. They ran up to 5 seconds faster in company than 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 of a spool as fast as they could, verifying that the curious phenomenon that he had observed with the cyclists. When they were accompanied by other children, the boys did the task faster.

It was in 1920 when Floyd Henry Allport (brother of Gordon Allport) coined the term social facilitation to describe this phenomenon. In one of his investigations, Allport studied how effectively a certain task was done 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 alone.

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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 show that we are as or more valid than those around us. Coercion is influenced by factors such as competition and peer pressure.

This phenomenon has not only been observed in humans. In a fairly old study carried out by the psychologist S. c. Chen (1937) observed how worker ants, when digging in the sand, worked up to three times better in company than those who did it alone.

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2. audience effect

The audience effect implies that when we feel observed by other people while we are executing a task that we have practiced and mastered, our performance improves. This is due to the motivation of try to please others, prove our worth and let them know how competent we are in a task.

For example, 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 where he feels safe enough and feels, too, that he masters it. He arrives on the day of the concert and he not only plays the piece flawlessly, but he actually does it better than when he practiced alone.

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Theories that explain the phenomenon of facilitation

Apart from the theory of social facilitation itself suggested by Allport and other authors, we have other theories and hypotheses that would explain the phenomenon. Among them we highlight the following three.

1. Appraisal Apprehension Hypothesis

This hypothesis holds that people, in reality, feel pressured by the fear of being evaluated by others. As we do not want to look bad in front of other people, we try to give the best of ourselves.

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2. Alert 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 think 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.

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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 find an effect that is just the opposite: social inhibition. As its name suggests, It consists of us doing a certain task worse, usually the one we have little skill in, being in the company of others than alone.

In 1933, J. Pessin conducted a study where 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 already extremely complicated, something that was even more difficult in the presence of such an intimidating public. The participants showed worse performance being observed than being alone.

Later, in 1956, Robert Zajonc further studied this negative effect of being watched by others, something that apparently contradicted Floyd Allport's theory of social facilitation. Zajonc observed how people did simple and complex tasks in the presence of others and analyzed the results. From Zajonc's perspective, when we are working in a group, we emit what he called the “dominant response”. This would be that, before the stimulation of others by their mere presence, the probability that an individual is more efficient increases, because it is what is expected of him.

Zajonc came to the conclusion that, when the tasks to be carried out are simple, either because of their low complexity or because you have great experience with them, the presence of other people makes us perform better than being alone. However, when tasks were more difficult or experience was not available, having an audience watching impaired 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. The current theory defends that, when we have to do something that we do master in the presence of other people, we will do it better than being alone. On the other hand, if what we have to do is something that we are not too crafty about or we perceive that we will do wrong, being in the presence of others we will do even worse because we will feel that they are going to judge us very negatively.