Some connections between the theories of social facilitation

There are a number of relationships between all the social facilitation models. With so many theories all trying to explain the same experimental interaction effect, many links must be possible. Some of these have already been mentioned in passing through the last five chapters.

A first point is that most of the mere presence and social conformity models must also predict concurrent attentional changes. If arousal arises in some fashion from the unpredictability of others (Guerin and Innes, 1982; Zajonc, 1980) then these others must be watched, at least briefly. If a behaviour standard matching process influences behaviour then subjects must have attended to their internal standards or to the external cues for the appropriate behaviours. This means that there must be epiphenomenal changes in attention with both arousal and social conformity models, so it is not clear whether attentional differences found between Alone and Presence conditions might be products of other differences in arousal or standard setting rather than causes in themselves.

A second point specifically concerns social conformity models which all suggest that in the presence of others certain socially approved behaviours are more frequent and socially disapproved behaviours more infrequent. The different theories conceptualize the source or storage of these socially valued behaviours in slightly different ways: as social standards, response sets, social schemata, or learned self-presentation strategies. The point here, though, is that each assumes that these behaviours can be described and predicted in different contexts. As suggested above, it is not clear that this can be done in practice independently of the social facilitation measurements.