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Social facilitation theory suggests that people perform better on simple tasks in a social setting, but worse on complex tasks. Norman Triplett first observed this in 1890, and subsequent researchers have proposed that arousal and distraction are factors in this phenomenon.
The term social facilitation refers to a psychological theory that people are more successful completing simple, familiar tasks if they are working within a group or in front of an audience. The theory also states that people are less successful completing complicated and unfamiliar tasks under the same conditions. This trend was first noticed in the late 1800s by Norman Triplett and confirmed through experimentation. There have been some subsequent refinements to his theory that attempt to explain the reasons for the observed behavior.
Social facilitation theory attempts to identify the effects of a social environment on a person’s task performance. When a person is given a familiar or easy-to-complete task in a social setting, such as working in a team, the presence of others appears to have a positive effect and improve performance. This positive outcome, called the social facilitation effect, occurs even if the person has an audience that watches all or part of the time. Promising someone to stop by to check on the worker also improves performance.
Social facilitation theory identifies a change in behavior when the attempted task is more complicated or unfamiliar. In these cases, the presence of others, such as observers or those working with the person in charge, actually has a negative effect. The person will actually perform worse with others around them than alone.
The behavioral tendencies included in social facilitation theory were first observed and studied in 1890 by a psychological researcher named Norman Triplett. He first noticed the phenomenon among cyclists and tested it by having children perform the simple task of winding line using a fishing rod and reel. He found that when the children worked together, they went much faster than if they each completed the task alone. In the following decades, the social facilitation effect was found to occur independently of competition, but actually hurt performance on complex tasks.
In the 1960s, a researcher named Robert Zaronc tried to explain differences in performance by proposing that others in the vicinity elicited a person’s state of arousal that increased the ability to perform familiar actions. He theorized that the aroused state improves performance on simple tasks, but not on complicated ones, because difficult tasks require unfamiliar actions that are harder to complete in the aroused state. In the 1980s, Robert Baron suggested that the differences could be explained by the fact that the presence of others was too much of a distraction during difficult tasks. Psychologists currently believe that a combination of these factors is actually responsible for the observed social facilitation effects.
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