Social Facilitation

Question 1

What is social facilitation?

Answer 1

Change in behaviour caused by presence of another individual who may or may not be watching

Question 2

How can social facilitation affect performance?

Answer 2

Improve on simple/well-rehearsed tasks

Worse on complex tasks

Question 3

What is the audience effect?

Give an example of research looking at audience effect

Answer 3

Change in behaviour when being observed (or belief you are being observed)

Worringham and Messick 1983 - Runner speed increase when watched

Question 4

What is the co-action effect?

Give an example of research looking at it

Answer 4

Change in behaviour when 2 or more people working on same task - as opponent or team mate

Triplett 1898 saw cycling performance improve

Question 5

What is home advantage?

Answer 5

Home teams generally tend to perform better - 60% of matches won by home team

Question 6

What did Carmichael and Thomas (2005) find about home advantage in football?

Answer 6

More effective attacking play

More accurate shooting

Question 7

What did Bray 1999 find about home advantage in NFL?

Answer 7

Teams win 17.5% more matches at home

Question 8

What did Hoffman et al. 2005 find about home advantage?

Answer 8

Decreases over the course of a season

Question 9

What is the impact of home advantage in critical games? Who found this?

Answer 9

Become a disadvantage - McEwan 2019

Due to added pressure - Baumeister and Steinhilber 1984

Supportive audience can cause overcautious - Wallace, Baumeister and Vohs 2005

Question 10

What is the impact of travel on performance?

Answer 10

Home advantage increase by 20% for each time zone crossed (Goumas 2013)

Travel fatigue may be more important if travelling east - Recht, Lew and Stewart 1995

Question 11

What is the relationship between crowd noise and home advantage?

Answer 11

As crowd noise increases, it changes the way officials behave

Found that more discretionary decisions were made that favour the home team and harsher punishments were given to the away team

Nevill et al 2002, Unkelbach & Memmert 2010

Question 12

How does audience participation impact performance?

Answer 12

Crowd size and density is the most important thing

Booing, fighting and cheering all impact home advantage

Verbal harassment of a player impairs completion of complex tasks - Thirer and Rampey 1979

Question 13

What does the activation theory state?

Answer 13

Presence of others serves as a source of arousal

There is an increase in self report and electrodermal arousal - Mullen et al. 1997

Question 14

Why is there an increase in arousal and self report with presence of other members?

Answer 14

Increased social monitoring, evaluation apprehension and attentional conflict

Question 15

What is Yerkes-Dodson’s Law?

Answer 15

Performance Increase with physiological/mental arousal upto a point. After this it is detrimental

Question 16

What is the evaluation apprehension theory and who first described it?

Answer 16

Cottrell 1968

Fear of being evaluated increases arousal

More expert the audience, higher level of perceived evaluation and more performances is impaired

Question 17

What is the attention approach theory split into?

Answer 17

distraction-conflict hypothesis

Overload hypothesis

Feedback loop model

Question 18

What is the distraction conflict hypothesis?

Answer 18

Level of performance on a task is predicted by distraction from environment. Distraction lead to arousal

Question 19

What is the overload hypothesis?

Answer 19

Distractions cause cognitive overload not increase in arousal

Question 20

What is the feedback loop model?

Answer 20

If feel observed, focus on self and become aware of differences between actual and anticipated behaviour

Question 21

What is self-presentation?

Answer 21

Process by which people monitor and control how they are perceived - Schlenker 1980

Question 22

What are the factors that impact self presentation?

Answer 22

Impression management - desire to create certain impression as influenced by trait and situation

Impression construction - how individual decide which images to create and how

Question 23

What is the “self”?

Answer 23

Source of consciousness - responsible for thoughts and actions

Cognitive and affective representation of ones identity

Question 24

What are the domains of self and standpoints you can view self?

Answer 24

Domains - actual, ideal, ought

Standpoints - self, other

Question 25

What did James and Collins 1997 find about self presentation?

Answer 25

Majority (67%) of perceived threat and stress in sport is due to self-presentation concerns

Question 26

What did Leary 1992 find about self presentation?

Answer 26

Social anxiety increases if try to create impression that one doubts they can

Question 27

What can an increase in self presentation focus cause?

Answer 27

• Disrupt concentration
• Increase anxiety and negative affect - Howle and Eklund 2012
• Increase instance of choking - Messagno et al 2011/12
• Decrease pre-game attentiveness
• Decrease self confidence - Podlog 2003

Question 28

What did Dr Divine et al. 2013 find about self presentation and group cohesion?

Answer 28

Higher team cohesion - GI-T associated with lower self presentation concerns

Question 29

What did Divine et al. 2013 determine as the reasons for reduced self-presentation concerns with higher team cohesion?

Answer 29

Increased security

Diffusion of evaluation

Question 30

What is self handicapping?

Answer 30

Future oriented self protection strategy to help maintain competence and public image

Blame performance on circumstance

Can be self reported or behavioural

Question 31

What is an example of self-reported self-handicapping?

Answer 31

Claiming injury or illness

Question 32

What is an example of behavioural self-handicapping?

Answer 32

Get drunk before an event

Act to interfere with performance

Question 33

What qualities are seen in individuals who commonly self-handicap?

Answer 33

Decreased likelihood to value hard work, effort and long term dedication

Question 34

How can you limit audience impact on performance?

Answer 34

Learn new skills without audience
Gradually introduce audience to training
Self-talk and visualise
Improve self-efficacy