EVALUATION APPREHENSION AND SOCIAL FACILITATION OF DOMINANT AND SUBORDINATE RESPONSES

Hypothesized that the presence of an audience enhances the emission of dominant responses at the expense of subordinate responses, only under conditions where the audience is perceived to be an evaluative element in the situation. An arousal interpretation of social facilitation phenomena was tested by taking direct measurements of autonomic reactivity during task performance. 68 male high school and college Ss performed a pseudorecognition task in which their responses were based on habits of varying strength established through prior training. The results confirm the main hypothesis. The probability of dominant responses was higher for Ss who though their performance was being evaluated, in contrast to those who worked either in the presence of a nonevaluating audience or alone. Correspondingly, the opposite effect was observed for subordinate responses, with the probability of their emission being greater in the nonevaluative-observer condition and in the alone condition. There was only a marginally significant difference between the response-emission slopes in the latter 2 conditions. Physiological data failed to support an autonomic arousal interpretation of social facilitation effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1968 American Psychological Association.