Social Facilitation:

Social facilitation means that people perform better in groups rather than individually. In short we can say that when people are being observed or when they feel that are to be evaluate by any viewer the work hard and try to do their best.

Now we will analyze the articles for the further explanation of this theory.  Article “Social Facilitation” which was written by Robert B. Zajonc  in this article he initially tells that prime example or the person who initiated the research on the social facilitation was Norman Tripplet. The idea that social evaluation has effect on performance was initially best illustrate by the psychologist Norman Triplett. He noticed the same behavior in cyclists. Triplett scoured the records of the 'League of American Wheelmen' and found that racing cyclists rode faster when paced or in competition. Analyzing the results of many races he found that, on average, cyclists with a pacemaker covered each mile about 5 seconds quicker than those without. He suspected it was more than just the purely physical effect of slipstreaming behind another cyclist, that the effect was also psychological (the mere presence of other people).

To test his feeling Triplett (1898) set children winding a thread on a reel, sometimes on their own and sometimes against others. What he found confirmed his theory: the children went faster when in competition. While interesting, though, the finding that people work faster in competition is hardly ground-breaking.

This tendency for people to perform simple tasks better when in the presence of others was called social facilitation.

On the other hand some people may perform worse when working in a group or when they feel that other are observing them. If we go back and once again look upon the experiment that was made by Tripllet. Children were given a task to operate a rod with reel on them for catching the fish, either in the presence of others or alone. Some children performed better alone, some others performed better with people watching. This showed that while some individuals were positively affected by the presence of others, some individuals were also negatively affected, yielding a decrease in performance. This negative effect on performance seemed to be in direct opposition to the other findings of Triplett but social psychologist Robert Zajonc made the connection between them by doing experiment.

In this experiment he initially trained the subject so that he becomes stable then afterward he was asked the subject to perform a task alone and then in presence of four to eight students they were asked to observe the subject quietly and attentively. He observe that when he was performing in front of group his performance was much greater and better then before here comes the a very big factor which increases our provocation that is Evaluation Apprehension-fear of being judged by other- can increase arousal because he was feared that students standing around him are actually judging them and he might be evaluate by them and this psychological factors lead to a greater performance than before. And the self-consciousness he feel when being evaluated can interfere even with behaviors he perform automatically.

Actually social facilitation only apply to simple task it has opposite results for complex task for example if a person is writing a novel and he feels that someone start observing him he will also encourages and tend to work hard but writing a novel demands more intentions and concentration as his intentions are diverted he would be able to perform better this is called as social interference.

In this article he demonstrates both effects in a very good way by doing experiment on cockroaches. He created two mazes, one easy, one hard. Behind the maze walls were other cockroaches, and sometimes the walls were glass, so that the other cockroaches could watch and other times they were covered with paper, so that they couldn’t watch.

So with the easy maze, a cockroach ran the maze faster when it could see other cockroaches—social facilitation. With the hard maze, a cockroach ran slower with others watching—social interference. So by doing different experiments he proved the presence of other do increase our performance.