Social facilitation: A self-presentational view.

Abstract

This article offers a self-presentat ional account of performance in others' presence. The account attributes social facilitation to the performer's active regulation of a public image, and it attributes social impairment to embarrassment following loss of public esteem. Individuals lose esteem by making numerous errors on difficult tasks. This self-presentational analysis is tested in a study of context effects in verbal learning. Two tasks are studied: a difficult task that includes a few simple items and an easy task that includes a few complex items. Consistent with the self-presentational analysis (but not with drive theories of social facilitation), the presence of an observer impairs the learning of simple items if those items are embedded within a difficult task. Also, an observer's presence does not impair the learning of complex items if those items are embedded within an easy task. Questionnaire responses suggest a naturally occurring confound between task difficulty and perceived failure. The influence of the presence of others on individual behavior, a classic topic in social psychology, was studied extensively in the early 1900s (Dashiell, 1935). Contemporary interest in the topic derives from Zajonc's proposal (1965) that the presence of others acts as a source of generalized drive (Spence, 1956), and energizes the dominant response tendency to the exclusion of competing responses. Cottrell (1972) amended Zajonc's theory, contending that the presence of others arouses apprehension over evaluations. He claimed evaluation apprehension as a source of generalized drive. This article proposes an alternative analysis of behavior in others' presence. Following Cottrell, the analysis attributes the influence of others' presence to the potential that presence gives them for evaluation. But Cottrell seemed to ignore the fact that the object of evaluation is the individual's perThis article is based on a dissertation submitted to Duke University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD. I am grateful to Alan Levy, my dissertation adviser, for his guidance and to Mike Gottesman for help with this research.