Distraction as a source of drive in social facilitation research.

Abstract

Distraction-conflict theory maintains that findings from social facilitation research result from the fact that the presence of others distracts subjects, thereby creating attentional conflict, which in turn produces drive effects. In support of this position, there already is a large amount of data indicating that presenting various forms of distraction during task settings produces drive effects. The present research complements these data by demonstrating that in a close replication of a well-known social facilitation study, subjects show indications across several measures of being more distracted in audience conditions than when they are alone. Moreover, this effect occurs regardless of whether the audience facilitates (simple) performance or impairs (complex) performance. These results are taken as support for distraction-conflict theory. Research in the area of social facilitation generally supports Zajonc's (1965) suggestion that the presence of others facilitates task performance on simple well-learned tasks and impairs performance on complex poorly learned tasks (Cottrell, 1972; Geen & Gange, 1977). We have argued (Sanders & Baron, 197S) that these drivelike effects occur because the presence of species mates creates attentional conflict within subjects in social facilitation research settings. This is presumed to be true because there are a variety of reasons to attend to species mates in such settings (such as a desire for social comparison), while at the same time there is pressure to work quickly and diligently on the task. Our feeling is that the resulting conflict could easily account for the drive effects described above (Brown & Farber, 1951; Kimble, 1961). In short, our position (referred to below as distraction-conflict theory) is that in typical social facilitation research, the crucial feature of audience and coaction treatments is their distracting