Social Facilitation: Definition and Origins

Social facilitation is a theory in psychology that suggests people have a tendency to be more productive or have higher performance when they are in the presence of others. This includes the real presence of other people in work environments as well as the implied, imagined, or digital presence of others. Social facilitation is also grouped into coaction effects—or when two people work on the same task work together as coactors—and audience effects, which is when a person completes a task in front of others or in front of an audience.

The opposite of social facilitation is social loafing, which is when the presence of an audience or another person actually makes a person lose focus or makes a certain type of task more difficult.

Norman Triplett investigated the theory of social facilitation; in 1898, he made the observation that cyclists performed better when they were competing against others as opposed to simply trying to beat their own time. Triplett later continued his social facilitation research when he performed an experiment in which he had children perform a simple task with a fishing reel. He found that half of the children worked faster when working along with others, while the other half were either slower or had equal performance. He published the results, titled “The Dynamogenic Factors in Pacemaking and Competition,” in The American Journal of Psychology and called this effect drive theory.

In 1920, the psychologist Floyd Allport labeled the stress-induced performance enhancement of the social interactions activation theory. In 1966, social psychologists Robert Zajonc and Stephen Sales proposed their dominant response theory in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They found that social facilitation improved performance for simple tasks a person is comfortable with but impaired performance for complex tasks.

There are three main contributors to social facilitation:

1. 1. Affective: Another person’s presence creates a sense of anxiety and apprehensions as they perform the task. These affective factors create a drive to perform better and receive a better evaluation.
2. 2. Cognitive: The mere presence of others can help improve focus and prevent distraction during tasks. For some people social facilitation can improve focus on task performance while for others it can be a distraction.
3. 3. Physiological: Having an audience or a partner working alongside you can create a higher arousal level and drive you to perform well. The physical arousal from social facilitation can make difficult tasks feel like easy tasks.

Many psychologists have continued to study social facilitation effects. Many different theories and approaches explore the effects of social facilitation, including the:

• Evaluation apprehension hypothesis: This theory, also called the evaluation approach, suggests that the evaluation from others or judgment from our peers in social situations is what leads to an enhancement in performance.
• Distraction-conflict theory: The distraction-conflict theory—presented by Robert Baron—suggests that in social situations, a person faces a conflict: Give attention to a person or give attention to a task. This conflict actually enhances individual performance of the task.
• Self-presentation approach: The self-presentation approach suggests that people become concerned with how they appear in front of an audience; they desire to look competent. Charles Bond and Linda Titus presented this theory in 1983 in a piece titled “Social facilitation: A meta-analysis of 241 studies” in the Psychological Bulletin.
• Yerkes–Dodson law: The Yerkes–Dodson law states that a person’s performance on a task while in the presence of others will depend on if the task is simple or complex.

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