Theories of Social Psychology
Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)
Theories of Social Psychology
Lesson 2 of 5
20 min
In 1982 James Michaels and colleagues watched students playing pool (a cue game like billiards) in a university student union in the United States. Without being noticed, observers first rated players as above or below average and recorded how many of their shots went in. Then a group of four observers walked up and openly stood watching the table.
| Players | Shots successful, not openly watched | Shots successful, watched by four people |
|---|---|---|
| Above-average players | 71% | 80% |
| Below-average players | 36% | 25% |
The same audience helped the skilled players and hurt the weaker ones. Any good theory of social facilitation has to explain both results.
Definition
Social facilitation: improved performance on a task because other people are present.
Social inhibition: worse performance on a task because other people are present.
Audience effect: the effect of people who watch; co-action effect: the effect of people doing the same task alongside you.
Dominant response: the response a person is most likely to make in a situation; for a well-practised skill it is usually correct, for a new or difficult skill it is often wrong.
Arousal: a state of physical and mental alertness, with a faster heartbeat and heightened attention.
Robert Zajonc (1965) proposed one explanation for both effects: the presence of others raises arousal, and arousal makes the dominant response more likely.
Figure 1. Drive theory predicts opposite effects of an audience on easy and hard tasks.
For the skilled pool players, the dominant response was a good shot, so being watched helped. For the weak players, the dominant response was a poor shot, so being watched made things worse.
| Explanation | Main claim | Supporting evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Mere presence (Zajonc) | Other people simply being there raises arousal, even if they are not judging you. | Schmitt and colleagues (1986): people typed their own name (easy) faster, and a coded version of it (hard) more slowly, even when the only other person present wore a blindfold and headphones. |
| Evaluation apprehension | Arousal comes from worry about being judged. | Effects are usually stronger when the audience is an expert or is watching closely. |
| Distraction–conflict (Baron, 1986) | Attention is split between the task and the audience; the conflict raises arousal. | Non-social distractions, such as flashing lights, can produce similar effects. |
In 1969 Zajonc, Alexander Heingartner and Edward Herman tested whether drive theory applies even to insects. Cockroaches escaped from a bright light either down a straight runway (easy) or through a maze with a turn (hard), either alone or with an “audience” of other cockroaches in clear boxes beside the track. The audience seemed to speed up running in the runway and slow it in the maze, and the study became a textbook classic.
Fifty years later, Eva Halfmann, Janina Bredehöft and Jan Häusser (2020) repeated it exactly, with a plan registered in advance. They found that an audience slowed cockroaches in both the runway and the maze. The inhibition effect replicated, but there was no facilitation effect, and the original authors had never tested the key interaction statistically.
Speaking a new language in front of the class is, for a beginner, a hard and new task: the dominant response may be a hesitation, a wrong word or a switch back to the mother tongue. Drive theory predicts that a large audience will make this worse, while a fluent speaker may perform better when watched. Teachers therefore often let students rehearse in pairs or small groups first, so that the right phrases become well-learned before the whole class listens.
Social Psychology group, Justus Liebig University Giessen: “Zajonc et al.’s cockroach-maze” (about 3 minutes). The group repeated the 1969 study in 2020; watch the runway and maze set-ups and the clear boxes that held the cockroach “audience”.
Important
Evaluate social facilitation theory. Drive theory neatly explains why the same audience helps some people and hurts others, and it is supported by field studies such as the pool-hall study and laboratory studies such as Schmitt’s. But the effects are usually small, they vary with personality (a 2007 review by Liad Uziel found that confident, outgoing people tend to do better with an audience and anxious people worse), and the famous cockroach evidence only half-replicated. “Easy” and “hard” are also hard to define in advance, which risks a circular explanation: a task is called hard because performance fell.
Warning
Don’t write that an audience always improves performance. “Facilitation” is only half the theory; the other half is inhibition on difficult or unfamiliar tasks.
Tip
Exam technique: for any scenario, decide first whether the task is well-learned for this person. The same task (giving a speech in French) can be easy for one student and hard for another.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the tables, Figure 1 and the exercises.
