6. The presence of others Flashcards
What is social inhibition?
The concept of doing worse at a task when you do it in front of other people.
What is social facilitation?
The flip side of social inhibition, where being in the presence of others enhances your performance.
Explain Triplett’s research into social facilitation and inhibition.
Triplett conducted a study in which 40 children took part in a task which involved wrapping string around a pulley as fast as they could using a ‘competition machine’. 6 trials were conducted; in half of these the children were competing with another child and in half they were performing alone.
RQ: Would participants perform better when competing with someone else?
No statistical significance testing was conducted because statistical tests did not exist at the time.
It was found that half of the children were faster when competing while ten showed no difference and ten performed worse in competition.
Triplett’s results have been reanalysed with more modern statistical methods and it has been found that the results in his data set don’t show a statistically significant difference.
Subsequent studies have shown that there is a true phenomenon to this.
Explain Zajonc’s research into social facilitation.
Zajonc & Sales: Participants had to learn 7-letter nonsense words that were shown to them either 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 times, such that those words they were exposed to more frequently should be better learnt.
In the main part of the study, participants were told that the words they had just learned would be flashed on a screen and that they would flash so quickly that participants may not be able to recognise them. Then, participants had to say aloud the word they had just seen and if they didn’t know they had to guess (because it flashed so quickly, no participants would have any true knowledge of what the real word was). The word that was flashed wasn’t even a word that they had learned. The assumption was that the participants would have to guess the word based on the nonsense words; better learned words should be elicited more frequently. There were 124 trials and the frequency the word was chosen was taken to be the better the word was learned.
Participants in the control group completed the task alone but participants in the ‘facilitated’ condition were watched by 2 spectators.
Better learned words= dominant responses
Lesser learned words= subordinate responses
Hypotheses:
- better learned words will be elicited more often
- the presence of others will increase the elicitation of better-learned words (social facilitation)
Both these hypotheses were supported. The frequency with which the participant had been exposed to the word was more predictive of it’s elicitation in the facilitation condition that the control one. The presence of other people elicits more dominant responses.
Social facilitation theory: proposes that the mere presence of other people elicits a general drive state of physiological arousal- this can make us perform better or worse. The heightened physiological arousal works to elicit well-learned responses and inhibit better learned responses.
Where the appropriate response a particular task is well-learned, the presence of people will activate the general drive state of physiological arousal which will facilitate the appropriate response and so social facilitation will happen. This will enhance performance on the task.
Where the appropriate response is less well learned, the presence of other people will activate the general drive state of physiological arousal and the appropriate response will be inhibited, resulting in social inhibition and performance impairment.
Explain the development of social facilitation theory through a follow-up study.
A conceptual replication study attempted to refine social facilitation theory used a similar procedure with nonsense word learning tasks, different frequencies and participants having to recall a word flashed on the screen.
The difference is that there were 3 different conditions:
- alone (control group)
- in front of 2 spectators
- presence of 2 blindfolded spectators
These researchers argued that what was important wasn’t that other people were present but that the other people who are present were watching the participant.
The control and first experimental group showed the same results as the original study, however no social facilitation was found in the group completing the task in the presence of blindfolded spectators who couldn’t observe the participant. The same pattern was found in the control group.
The presence of other people isn’t sufficient to lead to social facilitation. Those other people need to be able to actually view the participant.
It is actually the presence of others who are potentially observing us that leads to the general drive state.
It has been suggested that the presence of observers evokes evaluation apprehension; the feeling that others are going to evaluate us based on our performance. When we feel we are being evaluated we want to perform well for praise and recognition and we don’t want to perform badly because of fear of embarrassment. The presence of others observing us can either energise us to do well on tasks we’re good at or make us anxious about tasks we’re less good at. This relates back to the concept of self-presentation and wanting to present ourselves positively.
Explain research and development of the general drive state of social facilitation theory.
It has been argued that there are different physiological arousal states based on whether we feel energised to perform well (challenged) or anxious about not feeling well (threatened).
Blascovich et al. argued that evaluation apprehension can present a challenge or a threat to us.
Challenge: Where the person has sufficient resources to meet demands
Threat: Where person has insufficient resources to meet demands
They conducted a study to test whether the physiological arousal state differs based on whether being observed is perceived as a challenge or a threat.
Participants were trained in either a number-categorisation task or a pattern recognition one. As they were trained in performing that task, they learned the rule underpinning it- they learned how to perform it well. After this, they had to perform either the task they had just learned or the one they hadn’t learned, depending on their experimental condition. The learned task should represent a challenge and the unfamiliar one a threat. Participants completed the pain task either alone or in the presence of 2 observers. The observers took various physiological measures of arousal.
Results show that when someone is performing a well learned challenge in front of an audience, they show greater gains in indicators of a challenge state however where it is not well-learned participants participants experience gains in indicators of a threat state. Neither of these changes are shown when the participant is alone.
This shows that the type of physiological arousal depends on whether someone feels they have the resources they need to complete the task or they don’t.
If we have the resources required we experience challenge arousal, and if not then we experience threat arousal.
Explain alternate explanations for social facilitation theory.
Evaluation apprehension theory:
Geen argued that the crucial variable is not the presence of others but evaluation apprehension. The feeling that we may be evaluated on a task effects performance and so we can remove the ‘presence of others’ variable from social facilitation theory because it’s not required to give us an explanation. Studies have shown that social facilitation can occur because of imagined, perceived or implied presence of somebody else as this leads us to feel we will be evaluated.
Distraction-conflict theory:
Baron argued that facilitation effects arise because the presence of others distracts us and so leaves us to divide our limited attentional resources between the task at hand and those others that are watching us and if our attention is divided between a task and a distracting stimulus then the distraction will have less of an impact on the learned task but impair the one we know less well.
What is social loafing?
A reduction in individual effort due to the presence of others.
Explain Ringelmann’s research into social loafing.
Ringelmann wasn’t a psychologist but an agricultural engineer who was interested in finding the most effective methods for performing agricultural tasks such as pulling heavy loads.
In one set of data he compared the efficiency in differing numbers of people in in pulling a rope horizontally. In his study, participants were instructed to pull on the rope as hard as they could which they did either alone or with other people. The number of other people pulling with them differed. He found that when pulling alone, the mean total force exerted on the rope was 85.3kg, when 7 people were pulling it went up to 455 kg and when 14 people were pulling it went up to 860kg. When there are. more people pulling on the rope the total amount of force exerted on the rope increases but it doesn’t increase proportionately to the number of participants. Mean force per participant decreases the more people are pulling.
The Ringelmann effect: In groups, each individual expends less individual effort on the task than they do if doing it alone.
Explain the study by Latané et al. which sought to replicate the Ringelmann effect.
Participants were asked to clap or cheer as loudly as they could for five seconds, either alone or in the presence of other people.
Conditions: alone in pairs in fours in sixes
Each participant took part in 72 trials, 36 each for clapping and cheering. They measured performance using a sound level meter, recording in decibles and then converting into dynes per cm squared.
It was a repeated measures design to control for individual differences and the order of conditions was varied to ensure that exhaustion didn’t impact the findings.
RQ: Is the effort expended related to the group size?
The total sound volume was greater than that produced by individuals alone, and the effort expended per person went down as group size went up. The relationship between effort and group size is ‘curvilinear’ meaning the decline in effort expended in a curve shape as initial additions of people caused the greatest decrease in effort, and the decreases levelled off after a while.
This study replicated the Ringelmann effect.
This study was then replicated as it had not identified whether motivation loss or coordination loss was responsible for the Ringelmann effect occurring. They only looked at cheering and participants had to wear blindfolds and headphones while cheering. They heard through their headphones the sound of six other people cheering with them. Some participants were told they were shouting with others. In the actual group condition, this was true and other people cheered along with them. In the pseudo group condition, this was not true and the participant was actually cheering alone although they weren’t aware of this and were deceived by the sound of cheering through their headphones. The actual group should represent the combination of coordination and motivation loss and the pseudo group should only represent motivation loss.
RQ: Can the ringelmann effect be attributed to motivation loss alone?
It was found that the actual group showed a reduced effort when cheering in a group and the pseudo group also showed a weaker performance per participant in the group condition than individually but less so than in the actual group. This suggests that motivation loss and coordination loss produce the greatest decline in group output but there is still a noticeable loss of output when only motivation loss is at play.
What were the two factors Steiner suggested the Ringelmann effect can be attributed to?
Motivation loss: people lose the motivation to put in effort when other people join the group effort
Coordination loss: the way in which the efforts of individuals is combined leads to some kind of leakage or loss in total output
Why did Williams et al. suggest social loafing occurs?
Williams et al. hypothesised that social loafing occurs due to a lack of identifiability.
They ran another cheering study with an actual group and pseudo group condition. In stage 1, participants were only identifiable when alone but not when in a group. In stage 2, participants were given a microphone to shout into and were told their own contribution would be identifiable to the researcher. It was found that the stage 1 group replicated the findings from the Latané et al. study but no social loafing was identified in the stage 2 condition. This suggests that social loafing occurs because individuals feel that the contribution they make to the group will be less identifiable.
Some researchers have argued that identifiability is important due to evaluation apprehension, as people may worry they will be evaluated negatively if they are putting in less effort.
Explain alternate explanations of social loafing to identification.
Effort matching:
People loaf because they think that other people are going to put in less effort than them, and so there is no point in them putting in more effort. They seek to try and match the amount of effort they put into the task to that of everyone else. A study which supports this is another shouting one which found that confederates telling participants they were either going to try really hard or not try at hard impacted how much effort participants put in, specifically when confederates said they were not going to try hard. This is the sucker effect- participants don’t want to put in more effort because they don’t want to be the sucker that is carrying the group.
Dispensability of effort: people feel that their input is less important in a group simply because there are other people who will make a contribution too. People see their efforts as being more dispensable.
Explain the collective effort model of social loafing.
Karau & Williams argued that three variables are crucial for determining whether social loafing will occur.
- Expectancy: will my effort enhance the quality of the performance?
- Instrumentality: how useful will the individual performance be to the group outcome- will a high-quality performance help achieve a given outcome? How important will the group outcome be for personal outcomes?
- Valence of outcome: how desirable is the outcome to the participant?
They argued that social loafing is least likely to occur when they expect their effort to contribute to performance quality and they believe performance quality to be instrumental in achieving an outcome which they view as being potentially desirable.
Social loafing is most likely to occur when there are deficiencies in one or more of these three variables- they don’t think their effort will enhance performance, they don’t feel good performance will help achieve a particular outcome or they don’t think the outcome of the performance is particularly attractive.
This explains why social loafing is more likely to occur in some tasks than others.
Additive tasks: the group outcome is the sum of individual efforts
In some tasks, the group outcome is based on the best performance on only some members
What is a group?
There is an extra component to a group that is not present when you simply cluster people together- a group is more than the summation of individuals.
A group exists when two or more people define themselves as members of it and its existence is recognised by at least one other person.
Two or more people who define themselves and are recognised by others, as a group and have a sense of ‘us’ which can be compared to ‘them’.
Groupness has a psychological dimension and involves social identity as individuals identifying as part of the group is what keeps the group together.
It does not depend on physical proximity or face-to-face contact.
