Working alone or in the presence of others: exploring social facilitation in baggage X-ray security screening tasks

Abstract

This study investigated whether the mere presence of a human audience would evoke a social facilitation effect in baggage X-ray security screening tasks. A 2 (target presence: present vs. absent) × 2 (task complexity: simple vs. complex) × 2 (social presence: alone vs. human audience) within-subject experiment simulating a real baggage screening task was conducted. This experiment included 20 male participants. The participants' search performance in this task was recorded. The results showed that the presence of a human audience speeded up responses in simple tasks and slowed down responses in complex tasks. However, the social facilitation effect produced by the presence of a human audience had no effect on response accuracy. These findings suggested that the complexity of screening tasks should be considered when designing work organisation modes for security screening tasks.Practitioner summary: This study investigated whether the presence of a human audience could evoke a social facilitation effect in baggage X-ray security screening tasks. An experimental simulation was conducted. The results showed that the presence of a human audience facilitated the search performance of simple tasks and inhibited the performance of complex tasks.