The presence of others improves performance on well-learned tasks and impairs it on unfamiliar ones.
Triplett reported in 1898 that cyclists rode faster paced than alone, and the result became the founding experiment of social psychology. Zajonc reconciled seventy years of contradictory findings in 1965 by proposing that others raise arousal, which strengthens whatever response is already dominant: helpful when the dominant response is correct, harmful when it is not.
In practice
- An experienced presenter is better in front of a room and a nervous one is worse, from the same audience.
- An open-plan office speeds up routine work and makes anything requiring a first attempt harder.
- Possible explanations
- Zajonc's explanation is arousal, which strengthens the dominant response: on a practised task the dominant response is correct, and on an unfamiliar one it is not. Another is evaluation apprehension, since the audience must be capable of judging.
- In its favour
- The interaction with task difficulty is well supported across species and settings, and it reconciles seventy years of apparently contradictory results.
- Against it
- Triplett's founding cycling study has been reanalysed and found much weaker than reported, and effect sizes in the modern literature are modest and depend on who is watching.
- Standing
- Triplett's original cycling study has been re-analysed and found much weaker than reported. The interaction with task difficulty is the better-supported part; the size of the basic effect is modest.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind