PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Group Decision-Making, Social Facilitation, Social Loafing
Document Summary
Human beings, like all large primates except the orangutan, are group-living animals who influence and must get along with others. The presence of other people sometimes improves human performance and sometimes hinders it, but in predictable ways. Social facilitation is a term for the effect positive or negative of the presence of others on performance. Triplett noticed that the fastest times were recorded when cyclists competed directly against one another on the same track at the same time. Research on social facilitation (cid:894))ajo(cid:374)c"s theory(cid:895) has shown that the presence of others is arousi(cid:374)g, a(cid:374)d that arousal i(cid:374)creases people"s tendencies to do what they are already predisposed to do. On easy tasks, people are predisposed to respond correctly, so increasing this tendency facilitates performance. On novel or difficult tasks, people are not predisposed to respond correctly, so arousal hinders performance by making them more likely to respond incorrectly.
