Types of social facilitation theories

Rather than review chronologically all the theories proposed after Zajonc (1965), they will be discussed in terms of their content. The theories can be usefully grouped into three types: arousal, social conformity and cognitive process theories (cf. Geen, 1989: Guerin and Innes, 1984). They will be discussed in terms of these categories in the following chapters. Table 1, shown in the last chapter, lists all the theories of social facilitation in these terms. The overlap between some theories is shown as well. This categorization highlights the similarities between many of the theories into some better order. The present categorization will go some way towards that end, and Chapter 9 will continue this in more detail.

Some of the similarities between the different approaches can be traced back to the influence of Zajonc (1965). One side-effect of Zajonc's formulation was that most of the opposing theories put forward were still based on the drive hypothesis and treated social facilitation as a single phenomenon. There was disagreement over what exactly caused the increase in drive in the presence of others, but the drive mechanism went unchallenged. In fact, the first real non-drive explanation did not come until 1978 (Carver and Scheier, 1978).

As mentioned earlier, a further side-effect of the Zajonc (1965) paper was that the majority of experiments used the same paradigm and looked only for the same type of behaviour change - the facilitation of simple responses and the inhibition of complex responses.