How does social arousal influence performance? Use a picture, if you wish, to help you explain.

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How does social arousal influence performance? Use a picture, if you wish, to help you explain.



These co-actors in a situation with us can serve as a source of social arousal. For some people, this arousal is positive (such as fans at a home football game), and for some it can be negative (such as the home team's fans at an away game!).

The effect of social arousal is to strengthen whatever our dominant response is. This social arousal can have at least two effects. As you can see in the figure below if the dominant response is an easy behaviour, such as riding a bicycle, then performance can be enhanced. If the behaviour is a difficult one, such as tennis or a figure skating performance, the performance can actually be interrupted by the social arousal.

This process is called social facilitation. Social facilitation is a boost in performance on easy tasks and reduction in performance on difficult tasks.

More recently, this effect has been discussed as the strengthening of dominant (prevalence, or likely) responses in the presence of others.

As you can see from the figure below, the effect is quite clear. Zajonc (pronounced like Science with a "Z" as in Zcience) and Sales (1966) conducted a study where they asked people to pronounce various words between 1 and 16 times.

They were then told that they would be presented with those same words on a screen. However they were only presented with black lines for 1/100th of a second. Nonetheless, most people "saw" the words they have pronounced most frequently -- in other words these words have become the dominant response.

Furthermore, the researchers found that people recalled the dominant words more frequently when they were in front of an audience of two others. Thus, having an audience enhance the dominant response.

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