Social Facilitation Essay

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Social facilitation, also known as the audience effect, is the tendency to act or perform differently when surrounded by others than when they are alone. Studies have shown that people tend to perform better when doing a simple or well-rehearsed task rather than complex or new ones. These two articles discuss the phenomena of social facilitation and how it affects different situations.
In the article, Social Facilitation Effects of Virtual Humans written by Sung Park and Richard Catrambone, they discuss whether or not virtual humans can show social facilitation effects. To prove whether or not this was true Zanbaka, Ulinski, Goolskian, and Hodges (2004) set up a study to determine whether or not their observation is true. The hypothesis is …show more content…

Osborn, Brandon C. Irwin, Nikolaus J. Skogsberg, and Deborah L. Feltz, they research the phenomenons Kohler effect, also known as the Kohler motivation gain effect, and social compensation. The Kohler effect appears when less experienced group members increase their efforts in a group task. Social compensation happens when highly capable members increase their own effort to make up for the lack of effort from the less capable members in the group task. This study was done to research when motivation gains and losses occur in individual and group tasks. Motivation gains are interpreted from performance differences, which are determined by effort, which in turn becomes data of motivation. For this study the researchers came up with two hypotheses that analyze the strongest and weakest members. The first hypothesis: The weakest member will show a larger motivation gain, compared to the strongest group member, in moving from the individual to the relay performance and the second one: The strongest group member will show a motivation loss, depending on the importance of the meet (importance of finals preliminary relays). The participants in the first study were college swimming athletes (44 women, 24 men, total 68). There were seventeen four person teams that were going to swim the 200 yard relay and within each relay team they would be rank number one through four (one

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