Auburn University Main Campus Social Psychology Social Facilitation Discussion

Social Facilitation Assignment

Social facilitation boils down to the notion that the presence of others effects behavior. Have you ever been in a group of people when one person pulls out their cell-phone and checks it, and suddenly half the group has pulled out their cell-phones? This is the natural art of social facilitation at work. If you ever thought sneezing was contagious, you probably witnessed social facilitation at work. In addition to just affecting one another through our behaviors, Social Facilitation Theory suggests that the mere or imagined presence of people in social situations creates an atmosphere of evaluation. The mere presence of other people will enhance the performance in speed and accuracy of well-practiced tasks, but will degrade the performance of less familiar tasks. The role of social facilitation is important to consider in social situations, because it implies that people’s performance does not rely solely on their abilities, but is also impacted by the internal awareness of being evaluated. Performance can be greatly affected by situation factors, thus making it possible to entirely alter the outcome of a situation. This can be very important when considering how anyone will perform under evaluation and how to potentially prepare for those situations.

The goal of this assignment is for you to experience the art of social facilitation.

First, I want you to try to socially facilitate some sort of behavior. This is the basics of social facilitation – the mere presence of being around others effects behavior. There are some very simple things you can do to try to facilitate the behavior of others (I already gave the example of pulling out your cell-phone), for example, stand at a busy street corner and look-up…how many other people look up too?

• You need to describe the situation, who, what, when, where…
• What behavior did you try to socially facilitate?
• Did it work? Why do you think it did or didn’t work?

Second, I want you to experience the atmosphere of evaluation created by social facilitation. Are you really good at something? Or are you really bad at something? I want you to engage in a behavior that you are good or bad at while in a group setting (for example, I am horrible at the sport of billiards; when there is a large group of people around watching I am even worse).

• Describe the situation: who, what, when, where…
• What behavior are you going to engage in? Are you good or bad at it?
• Do you think the group affected your behavior? Tell me why you think they did or did not affect your behavior.

Your answers should be submitted via Blackboard in APA format. This means Title Page, Abstract, Introduction + Body + Conclusion, References. Some students combine the two activities into one paper and other students write two separate papers. This assignment is not to be taken lightly, should not be bullet pointed answers – Remember to introduce the concept of Social facilitation – what is it, who coined the term, etc… This will help you to begin your paper – then you should describe the facility where you were at, etc… This should also require you to have a reference at least for your textbook where you will get the definition for social facilitation..