Social Facilitation Paper

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Social facilitation can influence even the best of us. This phenomenon occurs when we successfully complete relatively simple tasks in front of others. Contrastingly, when others are around, we tend to fail at completing more complicated chores. The idea of social facilitation has been experimented and contemplated on for years. As time has progressed, every study conducted always has remaining questions that need to be answered. Andrew Schauer, Warren Seymour, and Russell Geen put together a thorough analysis on social facilitation on the topic of beginning counselors during the 1980s. They examined the effects of observation and evaluation on anxiety levels within said counselors. Though the article had a great amount of information, they …show more content…

For the first article, there wasn’t actually an established group of participants; it was a few from this study and then a few from that study. On the other hand, the second study was a lot more specific with their participants. Sung Park and Richard Catrambone had a total of 108 individuals from the Georgia Institute of Technology. It is also worth noting that we don’t know the demographics of the participants based on their gender, age, or race; neither of the articles goes into depth about who is being tested. Moreover, the way these two articles are considered applied research is because they take a concept and apply it to a situation. In this case, they take social facilitation and create environments that could cause the phenomenon to appear. For instance, in the article by Schauer, Seymour, and Geen, they create social facilitation by introducing different supervisors and by creating anxieties for said counselors. If the counselors had been by themselves and no observed, they could possibly not feel anxious. Additionally, in the second study, they helped create social facilitation occur by putting a fake person in the room and observing to see if it actually happened. Because the first article has a variety of studies, most of the studies followed the course of a field experiment. Participants from the studies were in-training or helping out a client, however, the situations were sit up to cause a reaction out of them. For instance, Schauer brought in actors to portray as clients, and this way he would be able to reduce mistakes (Schauer 1981). On the contrary, the second study was more of a lab experiment because it had the participants complete the tasks on a computer while the virtual being or human was placed a few feet away from them. Furthermore, although the articles’ aim

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