Failure and its Relationship to the Social Facilitation Effect: Evidence for a Learned Drive Interpretation of the Social Facilitation Effect

Abstract

Social facilitation theory states that an audience functions as a conditioned stimulus for generalized drive and that this drive effect is learned through classical conditioning. In the present study an attempt was made to condition classically an aversive drive to an audience by having a subject fail a task in front of an audience. A sample of 61 subjects took part in a 2 × 2 factorial design. Half of the subjects did not perform a first task but only a complex motor task. Half of these subjects performed in the presence of an audience, half without an audience present. Of those subjects exposed to failure on the first task, half performed a second complex motor task in the presence of the same audience. Results indicated that performance of subjects who failed a first task in the presence of an audience and then performed the second task in the presence of that audience was significantly poorer than all of the other groups. The findings were taken as evidence that the social facilitation effect may be based on an aversive learned drive.