Social Pressure on Individual Performance

Little of humans’ actions are carried out in isolation and thus, individual performance molds on and is shaped by the social context and, specifically, by activities performed by co-actors (Sebanz et al., 2003). As Albery et al. (2008) reasoned, other people may affect our performance on particular tasks and hence, we may even change the way we behave in terms of increasing the effort exerted towards a task in order to be favorably evaluated by others. This essay seeks to discuss the effects that the mere presence of other people have on individual performance and it is structured as following. The paper begins by introducing the concept of social facilitation. It will then go on to discuss a couple of theories that may offer a global understanding of the implications of social presence on individual performance.

The term ‘social facilitation’ was first used by Floyd Allport in 1920s and it postulates that, in terms of performance, an improvement of easy tasks and an impairment of difficult tasks may occur in the mere presence of conspecifics (Hogg and Vaughan, 2008). In other words, individuals are prone to perform better if they deal with a well-learned task than if they perform a rather unfamiliar or poorly learned assignment under certain circumstances and therefore, for the latter, the achievement deteriorates considerably. In essence, what social facilitation outlines is that, the individual performance can be affected by the presence of viewers. Corespondingly, according to Zajonc (1965), the main reason behind this is that the actual existence of an audience elevates drive levels. Although this may be true, the presence of others does not always make people perform better (Baumeister and Bushman, 2011).

Triplett (1898) h...

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