We have seen in the last chapter that one way for social facilitation research to develop further is to integrate the phenomena or events taking place in the social facilitation setting with other social psychological phenomena. This will lead us to the view that there is nothing special about social facilitation as a group of responses (facilitation or inhibition in the presence of others) but rather, that social facilitation is distinguished only by the particular setting that is used. If we change the social facilitation setting slightly we get similar effects, but ones which are labelled as separate phenomena with separate literatures.

The final point of this argument (in Chapter 11) is to ignore the labels ‘social facilitation’, ‘social loafing’, or ‘deindividuation’, and instead look more closely at the events which take place in different settings with different consequences. Response facilitation and inhibition can be produced in several ways, and it might be artificial not to treat these together.

Social facilitation is closely related to a number of other areas in social psychology. These are areas dealing with people alone versus people with others present, but with some other variable added as well or some slight difference in the setting. While some of these areas have already been compared to social facilitation by other researchers, this chapter looks at some other links which can be made as well. The major criterion for inclusion is that there is minimal social interaction or direct influence from between the subject and the persons present.