Distraction and social comparison as mediators of social facilitation effects

Sanders and Baron (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975, 32, 956–963) suggested that increases in drive produced by the presence of others (social facilitation) are due to the tendency for others to distract task performers as they worked on a task. This Distraction-Conflict theory proposes that socially mediated drive induction will occur whenever there is some reason to shift attention from the task to the social stimuli. In the case of humans, one such reason may be the opportunity to obtain social comparison information from an audience or coactors. The present research demonstrated that social facilitation effects (improved simple task performance and impaired complex task performance produced by the presence of others) occurred only when subjects were motivated to obtain comparison information (Experiment I) and when comparison information was available (Experiment II). The availability of comparison information also led to increased accuracy in estimating the coactor's performance. This indicated that in conditions manifesting social facilitation, subjects were spending some time monitoring the coactor's work, which is an inherently distracting activity. Several supplementary measures of distraction were generally consistent in indicating greater distraction under conditions manifesting social facilitation. The present results offer no support for the explanations of social facilitation suggested by Zajonc and by Cottrell.     

Self-awareness and physical aggression

A theory of self-awareness was applied to aggression. In Experiment I, men were given an opportunity to aggress against women in the presence of a mirror, an audience, or neither. The mirror significantly inhibited aggression, but the audience did not. In Experiment II, an audience inhibited aggression, but only when there was frequent eye contact between the aggressor and the audience. These results were consistent with the predictions derived from the theory.     

Explanations of social facilitation: A review

A review is made of the behavioral effects of the presence of a conspecific. A large number of behavior changes are discussed, in three groups. First, there are effects of the presence of others on the level of arousal or alertness; under predictable conditions the presence of a conspecific will increase arousal level. Second, there are effects on attentional processes. For a variety of reasons, conspecifics require attending. Third, the presence of others can induce a social valuation on particular behaviors, so that they become positively or negatively valued. For each of these three groups, a number of possible mechanisms are elaborated, and a number of mediating variables are discussed. Further, an attempt is made to link each of these behavioral effects to human and nonhuman social relations, to show how they function in social organization. Even the “minimal” social setting, one person with another, can have effects ranging from physiological changes to inducing the “presence” of the social power structures or social organization of a social group. Lastly, future directions for research in this area are suggested, and problems with the present research are examined. Foremost here is the use of implied audiences, mirrors, and real audiences, as manipulations of social conditions. It is argued that these will result in different effects, and some evidence for this is reviewed.     

Public and private self-awareness: When personal attitudes conflict with societal expectations

Different methods of inducing self-awareness have generally been assumed to be interchangeable. The present paper argues that the two most widely used manipulations of self-awareness—audiences and mirrors—differ in an important way: specifically, audiences increase focus on the public aspects of the self, whereas mirrors focus attention on the private aspects of the self. It is further argued that the standards that are used to regulate behavior depend upon which of these self-aspects is taken as the object of attention. Attention to the private self may result in behavior that reflects personal attitudes; attention to the public self may cause behavior to become more consistent with societal expectations. This reasoning was tested in two studies in which subjects served as “teachers” in an aggression paradigm. Each subject in Experiment 1 opposed the use of punishment in learing, but felt that other people favored it. Compared to the control condition, the presence of a mirror led to decreased levels of shock, and the presence of an evaluative audience led to increased levels of shock. Experiment 2 made use of subjects who favored the use of punishment but felt that others were against its use. Compared to the control group, the presence of a mirror led to increased levels of shock whereas the presence of an evaluative audience led to decreased levels of shock. Taken together, these findings indicate that self-awareness manipulations need to be chosen according to the aspect of self that is to be the object of self-attention. Discussion centers on the implications of the public-private distinction.     

Enhancing Immediate Retention with Clickers Through Individual Response Identification

Classroom audience response systems, in which students respond to class questions via a remote ‘clicker’ unit, are widely used as a method for increasing student participation and providing immediate feedback in the form of a group frequency distribution. The phenomenon of social facilitation shows that task performance can be enhanced with co‐action of others or with the presence of an audience. To enhance the audience effect, we employed a unique feedback system that displays each individual's response. After reading a text passage, participants responded via a remote clicker to a series of comprehension questions. Participants were provided with no feedback regarding other respondents' answers, group feedback, or individual feedback. The results demonstrated significantly higher test performance with individual response identification. Implications are discussed in terms of applied classroom settings and social facilitation with enhanced options for displaying different types of feedback with clickers during instruction. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distraction,attentional conflict,and drivelike behavior

Two studies provide evidence supporting a distraction-conflict view of social facilitation effects. Study 1 demonstrated that presence of an audience produced drivelike effects on the latency and vigor of a motor response. This effect, however, only occurred when attending to the audience caused attentional conflict. Study 2 demonstrated that in a two-task setting, attentional conflict, resulting from having to choose which task to work on, led to poorer performance on a complex copying task (p < .01, one tailed) and a larger percentage of dominant responses on J. L. Cohen and J. H. Davis' (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973, 27, 74–85) hidden word task (p < .04, one tailed), relative to a yoked control. Study 2 is consistent with earlier reports that choice heightens drivelike effects, while Study 1 indicates that attentional conflict contributes to social facilitation phenomena.     

Social Facilitation: A Test of Competing Theories1

Evaluation–apprehension and distraction–conflict have typically been treated as alternative explanations for social facilitation. The present study tested both theories under a single design. The study examined (a) whether each explanation predicted social‐facilitation performance outcomes and (b) whether combining evaluation and distraction manipulations produced even greater performance outcomes. The present study also explored whether physical presence is necessary to produce social‐facilitation effects when evaluation and distraction manipulations are already present. The study found significant facilitation effects on the simple task only in the evaluation–apprehension condition. Significant performance impairment was found for both evaluation and distraction. Combining evaluation with distraction led to greater effects only on the complex task. Furthermore, physical presence does not appear necessary to produce social‐facilitation effects.     

Social facilitation as a function of the mere presence of others

According to R. B. Zajonc's (1965) drive theory of social facilitation, the mere presence of others increases arousal and, thereby, the frequency of dominant responses (i.e., responses with the greatest habit strength). In the present experiment, U.S. undergraduates performed a stimulus discrimination task under 1 of 2 conditions: in the presence of another individual (audience) or alone. The mere presence condition was designed to make it difficult for the participants to attend directly to the audience. The task was designed to minimize the likelihood that the specific response (numerical preference) would be attributable to a desire to respond appropriately to the audience. There was a significant difference in the mean number of dominant responses between the participants in the audience condition and those in the alone condition. The results provide support for Zajonc's mere presence drive theory of social facilitation.     

Threatened retaliation from the victim as an inhibitor of physical aggression

Sixty male undergraduates participated in an experiment designed to investigate the effects of apparent probability of retaliation from the victim and level of prior anger arousal upon adult aggressive behavior. It was hypothesized that threatened retaliation would be highly effective in inhibiting subsequent aggression under conditions where subjects had not previously been angered by the victim, but would generally fail to inhibit such behavior under conditions where they had previously suffered strong provocation at the hands of this person. Support was obtained for both of these predictions. Findings were discussed in terms of their implications for the prevention and control of human violence in naturalistic social situations.     

Facilitating Game Play: How Others Affect Performance at and Enjoyment of Video Games

The current study implements the drive theory of social facilitation to explain the influence of audience presence in video game play. This integration is an important one for research aiming to understand the experience of video game play, as the social aspect of video game play is a relevant dimension of the technology often ignored in research on gaming experiences. The study finds a significant positive association between non-gaming cognitive abilities (such as hand–eye coordination and mental rotation ability) and performance at a first-person shooter. Data also support the social facilitation hypothesis: Game play in the presence of a physical audience significantly predicts increased game performance. Social facilitation effects are only found for low-challenge games where the drive-inducing capacity of task challenge is minimized. Resultant influences on game enjoyment are less clear.     

Distinctness of others, mutability of selves: their impact on self-evaluations

The authors postulate that the outcome of social comparison processes is determined by the role social comparison information serves during the self-evaluation process. Assimilation is more likely in situations that instigate the inclusion of social comparison information in self-representations. Contrast is the more probable outcome when information about another person is used as a reference point for self-judgments. Whether comparison information instigates interpretation or comparison effects depends on the distinctness of this information as well as the perceived mutability of the self. The authors found support for their perspective using different types of manipulations of the distinctness construct, treating self-mutability as a contextual as well as an individual-difference variable, and measuring the effects of social comparisons on measures likely to reveal both assimilation and contrast effects (self-evaluative judgments and behavioral predictions), assimilation effects only (mood measures), and motivational self-repair effects (importance ratings of the focal comparison dimension).     

Social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability: conformity, complexity, and bolstering

This experiment tested predictions derived from a social contingency model of judgment and choice that identifies 3 distinctive strategies that people rely on in dealing with demands for accountability from important interpersonal or institutional audiences. The model predicts that (a) when people know the views of the audience and are unconstrained by past commitments, they will rely on the low-effort acceptability heuristic and simply shift their views toward those of the prospective audience, (b) when people do not know the views of the audience and are unconstrained by past commitments, they will be motivated to think in relatively flexible, multidimensional ways (preemptive self-criticism), and (c) when people are accountable for positions to which they feel committed, they will devote the majority of their mental effort to justifying those positions (defensive bolstering). The experiment yielded results supportive of these 3 predictions. The study also revealed some evidence of individual differences in social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability.     

Corticospinal excitability during the observation of social behavior

Evidence suggests that the observation of an action induces in the observers an enhancement of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded by the observer’s muscles corresponding to those involved in the observed action. Although this is a well-studied phenomenon, it remains still unclear how the viewer’s motor facilitation is influenced by the social content characterizing the observed scene. In the present study we investigated the facilitation of the corticospinal system during the observation of either an action that does not imply a social interaction (i.e., an actor throwing a ball against a wall), or an action which implies a social interaction (i.e., an actor passing a ball to a partner). Results indicate that MEPs amplitude is enhanced during the observation of a social rather than an individual action. We contend that the increase in MEPs activation might reflect an enhancement of the simulative activity stemming from the mirror system during the observation of social interactions. Altogether these findings show that the human corticospinal system is sensitive to social interactions and may support the role of the mirror neurons system in social cognition.     

Social Facilitation as a Function of the Mere Presence of Others

Abstract

According to R. B. Zajonc's (1965) drive theory of social facilitation, the mere presence of others increases arousal and, thereby, the frequency of dominant responses (i.e., responses with the greatest habit strength). In the present experiment, U.S. undergraduates performed a stimulus discrimination task under 1 of 2 conditions: in the presence of another individual (audience) or alone. The mere presence condition was designed to make it difficult for the participants to attend directly to the audience. The task was designed to minimize the likelihood that the specific response (numerical preference) would be attributable to a desire to respond appropriately to the audience. There was a significant difference in the mean number of dominant responses between the participants in the audience condition and those in the alone condition. The results provide support for Zajonc's mere presence drive theory of social facilitation.     

Selection bias in social facilitation theory? Audience effects on elite biathletes' performance are gender-specific

Social facilitation proves robust in conditioning tasks (e.g., running), yet in coordination tasks (e.g., rifle-shooting) some studies report performance deterioration. Recent Biathlon World Cup data offered the unique opportunity to test this task-specificity (conditioning = cross country skiing, coordination = rifle-shooting). Audience restrictions due to COVID-19 allowed to compare athletes' performance in the absence (2020) and presence (season 2018/2019) of an audience. Gender-specific regulations (e.g., course length) necessitated the inclusion of gender as additional factor. Results of 83 (sprint competition) and 34 (mass start competition) biathletes revealed that task-specific social facilitation is moderated by gender: In the presence of an audience male biathletes showed performance improvements in the conditioning task and performance deteriorations in the coordination task; female biathletes showed the reverse pattern. This gender dependency may have gone unnoticed in the past due to sample selection bias (<1/3 female), thereby questioning the generalizability of social facilitation theory.     

Social facilitation during the initial stage of motor learning: a re-examination of Martens' audience study

This study partially replicated Martens' (1969a) social-facilitation study of motor behavior. His very robust performance findings provided impressive confirmation for Zajonc's hypothesis, and his arousal findings have since been used as evidence for a nonlearned-drive basis for social facilitation. The present study also extended Martens' investigation by examining the separate and combined effects of an audience and videotape camera. The effects due to the presence of the audience and camera were not additive; instead, the audience detrimentally affected subjects' performance consistency and the camera resulted in more trials with errors greater than 30 msec after the performance criteria had been attained. Martens' most robust findings for constant error were not replicated, nor were some of his physiological arousal findings. His pattern of constant error results over all trials is atypical of known learning strategies that subjects use to reduce error over successive trials. Overall, audience effects accounted for only a very small portion of the variance.     

Presence of administrators differentially impacts eyewitness discriminability for same- and other-race identifications

Best practice guidelines recommend that eyewitness lineup administrators be blind to a suspect's identity, but no research has investigated whether the mere presence of a lineup administrator impacts eyewitness identification decisions. Informed by social facilitation theory, we predicted that the presence of an audience would differentially impact identification accuracy for same- and other-race identifications. Participants (N = 191) viewed same- and other-race lineups either with an audience or alone. Although the presence of an audience did not directly impact identification accuracy, significant indirect effects indicated that the audience provoked evaluation apprehension which hindered other-race identification accuracy and improved same-race identification accuracy. We suggest that using double-blind lineup procedures may not sufficiently protect eyewitness identification accuracy when making other-race lineup decisions in the presence of others.     

Categorizing at the group‐level in response to intragroup social comparisons: a self‐categorization theory integration of self‐evaluation and social identity motives

Two experiments examined how people respond to upward social comparisons in terms of the extent to which they categorize the self and the source of comparison within the same social group. Self‐evaluation maintenance theory (SEM) suggests that upward ingroup comparisons can lead to the rejection of a shared categorization, because shared categorization makes the comparison more meaningful and threatening. In contrast, social identity theory (SIT) suggests that upward ingroup comparisons can lead to the acceptance of shared categorization because a high‐performing ingroup member enhances the ingroup identity. We attempted to resolve these differing predictions using self‐categorization theory, arguing that SEM applies to contexts that make salient one's personal identity, and SIT applies to contexts that make collective identity salient. Consistent with this perspective, the level of identity activated in context moderated the effect of an upward ingroup comparison on the acceptance of shared social categorization. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Virtual prejudice

According to recent theorizing in social psychology, social behavior is controlled not only by reflective, but also by impulsive systems. The latter are based on associative links that may influence behavior without intent. The current study examined how prejudiced implicit associations affect physiological and automatic behavioral responses. Our native Dutch participants were immersed in a virtual environment in which they encountered virtual persons (avatars) with either White or Moroccan facial features. In line with our predictions, participants maintained more distance and showed an increase in skin conductance level when approaching Moroccan avatars as opposed to White avatars. Participants’ implicit negative associations with Moroccans moderated both effects. Moreover, evidence was found that the relation between implicit prejudice and distance effects was fully mediated by skin conductance level effects. These data demonstrate how prejudiced implicit associations may unintentionally lead to impulsive discriminatory responses.     

The Role of Pluralistic Ignorance in the Reporting of Sexual Harassment

There have been many attempts to explain how and why people report incidents of sexual harassment. One area that has been overlooked is the influence of the targets' social cognition processes on these reports, particularly social comparison processes such as pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a social comparison phenomenon whereby individuals mistakenly believe they are in the minority. In the case of harassment, pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals mistakenly interpret the behavioral responses of others to mistakenly believe that they are alone in their discomfort with harassment. We investigated the role of pluralistic ignorance in this process by exposing undergraduate students to sexist jokes while manipulating their access to behavioral responses of others. We measured their comfort level and their perceptions of the humor of the jokes. We compared their responses, most importantly, with how many jokes they read prior to “reporting” their discomfort with the jokes. We found evidence for the proposed role of pluralistic ignorance in the sexual harassment reporting process, whereby exposure to behavioral responses of others influences perceptions of others' relative comfort and humor, which in turn led to a decreased likelihood of reporting the harassment.