Test of Weiss and Miller's Social Facilitation Hypothesis: Are Audiences Aversive?

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to explore Weiss and Miller's extension of Zajonc's social facilitation theory. Subjects were given a choice of working on two equally attractive tasks in the presence or absence of an audience. The results indicate that subjects more frequently chose to work without an audience. This finding supports the aversive-drive notion of observation by an audience as proposed by Weiss and Miller and suggests that the social facilitation phenomenon could be extended by using a relevant drive paradigm in contrast to the irrelevant drive paradigm of traditional research on social facilitation.