Social facilitation

Social facilitation - a naturally occurring increase in the activity of the subject due to the presence of a social environment.

A facilitator is someone whose presence provides relief, who naturally contributes to improving performance in a person's (or group of) activities.

One of the effects of the "group "is that the individual's activity increases in the conditions of its implementation in the "group" compared to the usual level of the same activity in the individual implementation. Most often, social facilitation is found in the situation of competition with other members of the "group". This effect is observed not only in humans, but also in animals, for example in eating behavior (in insects, fish, chickens, rats, etc.). For the first time, the fact of social facilitation was scientifically recorded in a study by Norman Triplett (1898), who measured how much cyclists increase speed in the presence of other cyclists.

Social facilitation is a hindrance when performing complex tasks

It has been experimentally proven that in the presence of strangers, people who are experiencing stress, sweat more, their breathing and pulse quicken, their muscles tighten more and their blood pressure rises more noticeably. Participants in experiments with observers quickly solved simple examples for multiplication and crossed out certain letters from the text. However, in certain situations, strangers interfered. Thus, in the presence of observers, students coped faster with an easy maze and longer with a difficult one.

Social psychologist Robert Zajonc suggested that excitation favors the solution of simple problems, but complicates the implementation difficult. Reeling in fishing lines, solving simple multiplication problems, and completing tasks related to food-in such simple actions, the presence of outsiders "spurs" us. Learning new material, passing through a maze, or solving complex mathematical problems are more difficult tasks, the correct responses to which are not so obvious from the very beginning. In such situations, the presence of outsiders leads to an increase in the number of incorrect responses. In both cases, the same General rule "works": arousal favors the dominant reactions. At the same time, self-arousal is only partly a consequence of the fear of evaluation and distraction of attention to outsiders (from the book by D. Myers "Social psychology").