Social Facilitation

The social facilitation theory ( loosely translated Social facilitation ) states that living things get better results with simple tasks in mere presence of conspecifics. For complex tasks, this relief is reversed and decreases the person's performance.

The antonym of social facilitation is the social lounging, the easing of tension due to the presence of conspecifics.

Explanations

The phenomenon is mainly explained by a formation of emotional arousal in the presence of other people. Due to this excitation is preferentially reacts by persons with a dominant response, eg one will give a wrong answer in excitement, although one has the right answer just learned, because - may for years assumed to be correct - wrong answer is still the dominant reaction.

To explain the excitement, there are three theoretical positions

• Mere presence ( German " mere presence " ): This theory states that people are just because of the knowledge that other people are there, excited and therefore more likely to respond with a dominant reaction (theory of Robert Zajonc ).
• Valuation expectation hypothesis: The hypothesis stating that watching people worrying about the expectations of the audience and therefore are excited, because they do not want to embarrass and want to look good.
• Deflection theory: This theory states that watching people watching people in their environment, in turn, themselves and are therefore distracted from the task at hand.

Empiricism

Was first observed this phenomenon by Norman Triplett in 1898. He observed that cyclists are faster when they are competing against other, as if they go against the clock.

Robert Zajonc then introduced this phenomenon in 1965 back to the excitement. For experimental verification, he built in his laboratory on a labyrinth in which he put a cockroach ( cockroach ). Other cockroaches were able to observe this. In the simple experimental condition, a light source was mounted on a side, in the opposite side of the hole was to exit the maze. As now As for the light source, was the dominant response of cockroach to leave the light directly, which did succeed in a short time. If we push the experiment without the cockroaches in the "spectator boxes" by, the cockroach took longer to get to the exit.

In the difficult experimental condition the cockroach could not rely on direct picture of the maze, because the outcome was not at the opposite end of the maze, but they had to run around the corner to leave the light cone. In this difficult task, the cockroach with spectators took longer than without what Zajonc hypothesis confirmed.