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.

An outline of Zajonc (1965)

As we saw in the last chapter, social facilitation research was either ignored or not carried out enthusiastically in the years after the Second World War. In 1965, Zajonc produced an influential account of the social facilitation literature. In this he made at least nine points, which, because of the importance of his article in renewing interest in the field, will be discussed in detail. Before doing this, the changes in experimental psychology which had occurred need to be outlined.

The development of experimental psychology

It needs to be kept in mind that between the last of the social facilitation studies and 1965, the whole research orientation of psychology, as well as theoretical orientation, had changed. Conceptually Hullian behaviourism had dominated psychology for many years, with its hypothetico-deductive model of research, its mechanistic approach, and its emphasis on observable behaviour.

Hullian behaviourism was a reaction to the looseness and conceptual uncertainty of earlier psychologies. Too many of the psychologies of the first third of this century dealt only with what people said about themselves: the verbalizations (introspections) about their thoughts, behaviour, feelings and emotions. While it is clear that how people talk about their own psychology is important (Farr and Moscovici, 1984), it was no longer clear by the mid-century that such verbalizations should be the basis for how psychology talks about thoughts, behaviour, feelings and emotions. After all, physicists no longer took seriously how people talked about tables and chairs: they considered the constituent molecules and atoms instead.

The rise of the cognitive approach in psychology can probably be dated to the publication of Miller, Galanter and Pribram (1960), while its position in social psychology was most clearly stated by Zajonc (1968a). Miller et al.'s book did not so much present any new data about psychology, but rather, it gave psychologists permission to speak about events which they could not observe. This was antithetical to the dominant behaviourisms of Hull and Spence, but not to that of Skinner (1974). Giving such permission had some benefits, but it also had some costs which are perhaps only now being appreciated in social psychology.

The benefit of speaking about unobservable events was that such events could be modelled in words, symbols or equations, and predictions made of observable behaviour. Such a strategy had helped the development of nuclear physics, for example, by allowing modelling of (then) unobservable atoms and electrons. Since being applied to social psychology, there has been a rapid proliferation of cognitive models (Markus and Zajonc, 1985).

The problem with cognitive models is that unless strict controls are kept on theorizing (see Skinner, 1950), the models can become underdetermined or indeterminate, such that many different models can be supported by the same observed data. We have, in fact, already seen some of this occurring in the last chapter, when each of the theories could account for the same data in seemingly different ways.

The major conclusion of this book must be that social facilitation consists of many phenomena which are common to other social psychological areas of interest (see Geen, 1989, 1991; Paulus, 1983). What defines social facilitation is the particular mix of conditions which is usually present in the social facilitation setting, rather than any defining phenomena such as an increase or decrease in responding.

The animal studies suggested that the changes in the presence of other animals are primarily due to disinhibition of fear responses. When in groups most animals spend less time with fear responses and this facilitates the performance of other behaviours. These other behaviours might be an increase in eating (for chicks), an increase in vigilance (e.g., Lazarus, 1979), or increased social interaction concomitant with decreases in other behaviours such as eating (for rats).

With humans there was some evidence for mere presence effects (Chapter 8). A model based on monitoring was presented as a possible explanation for such effects. While this is obviously not the last word, it at least provides a way of defining mere presence which goes beyond just defining it as the absence of any other effects.

Besides mere presence effects, there were many other phenomena evident in the presence of another person: apprehension about evaluation; changes in self-awareness; increases in self-presentation strategies; increases in behaviours for which other people have become discriminative stimuli; increases in verbal behaviours; behaviour inhibition (at least for rehearsal strategies); physical distraction; cognitive distraction; narrowing of attention; and increases in social comparisons.

Social facilitation is said to occur when one animal increases or decreases its behaviour in the presence of another animal which does not otherwise interact with it. Typically, a chicken might be found to eat more when another chicken is present, even if this other chicken does not reinforce, communicate, exhibit eating behaviour, or compete for food. Likewise, social facilitation is said to occur when humans run faster, read less, type quicker, or do fewer arithmetic problems in the presence of another person, but only if the other person does not reinforce the behaviour, show how it is done, set a performance standard, or compete.

These changes in behaviour were first studied as a phenomenon in 1898, and have since become known as social facilitation, whether the changes in behaviour are an increase or a decrease. In research, a human subject will perform a task alone and in the presence of another person, and the two types of conditions are compared.

It can be seen that social facilitation is defined through exclusion: it is said to occur when no other explanation (competition, reinforcement, cueing, cooperation) is possible. This makes it difficult to say exactly what social facilitation is, except by demonstrating that a behaviour has increased or decreased in the presence of another animal and that other explanations are not possible.

Put in these terms, it might be wondered why anyone would bother studying such finicky and elusive effects. The fact is, however, that social facilitation is one of the oldest topics in social psychology, and lays claim to being the first topic studied in experimental social psychology.