Social Facilitation

Social facilitation is the strengthening of dominant responses in the presence of others. This implies that whenever people are being watched by others, they will do well on things that they are already good at doing. The idea that social evaluation has an impact on performance sparked interest in the psychological reasons behind this phenomenon, leading to further research surrounding the Social Facilitation Theory and its implications.

This theory suggests that the mere or imagined presence of people in social situations creates an atmosphere of evaluation. Yerkes Dodson's Law Theory of Social Facilitation states that in this atmosphere, "the mere presence of other people will enhance the performance in speed and accuracy of well-practiced tasks, but will degrade the performance of less familiar tasks."

For example, a star soccer player may perform better in his game when more people are watching him perform. However, if a person is asked to fix a car’s engine during a road race but is not a mechanic, he will not perform as well if he is aware of the presence of others than he would in a situation when he feels less evaluated or pressured, like just trying to fix a car in his garage.

Social facilitation has occasionally been attributed to the fact that certain people are more susceptible to social influence, with the argument that person factors can make these people more aware of evaluation. These personality characteristics may cause some people to be more greatly affected by the presence of their observers.

The role of social facilitation is important to consider in social situations, because it implies that people’s performance does not rely solely on their abilities, but is also impacted by the internal awareness of being evaluated. Performance can be greatly affected by situation factors, thus making it possible to entirely alter the outcome of a situation. This can be very important when considering how anyone will perform under evaluation and how to potentially prepare for those situations. For example, if a professional basketball player practices shooting free throws with fake audience noise in the background, he will not feel as if he is under as much evaluation in a real game situation. This is because the noise-pressured free throws will start to become a simple task rather than a complex task as he practices more. Although he will know that the fake noise is not evaluating him the same way that real crowd would, he is adjusting his awareness of the potential evaluation, and is thus trying to combat any harm that social facilitation could bring to his shooting abilities.